
Class ■ ■ fi^R S'^o 



Book 



o 



/ 0^/r\ 



Cop}Tight}J^ 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSnv 



COURSE XVII 

Booklovers Reading Club 

Hand-Book 




Dr. LYMAN ABBOTT 

Dr. WASHINGTON GLADDEN 

Dr. SAMUEL D. McCONNELL 

Dr. AMORY H. BRADFORD 

Prest WILLIAM DeWITT HYDE 

Dr. HENRY COLLIN MINTON 

Dr. H. W. THOMAS 

Dr. THEODORE T. MUNGER 

And Others 



// 




ISSUED FROM THE PRESS OF 
THE BOOKLOFERS LIBRARY 
1323 WALNUT ST., PHILADELPHIA 



(5) 




REV. LYMAN ABBOTT 



THE BOOKLOVERS READING 
CLUB HAND-BOOK TO AC- 
COMPANY THE READING COURSE 
ENTITLED, STUDIES IN CURRENT 
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 




SEYMOUR EATON 



Lz& 



torartan 



FREDERIC W. SPEIRS, Ph.D 

Educational Director 



(7) 



THF LiSRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two CoHES Received 

DEC. 2 1901 

COPVRtQHT ENTRY 

CLASS <^-XXa Ho. 

/ r ^ 7 6" 

C©PY Li. 



copyrjght, i9oi 
The Booklo\er5 Library 



STUDIES IN CURRENT 
RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 



Course XVII: Booklovers Reading Club 
BOOKS SELECTED 

FOR THIS READING COURSE 

by 

D"^ LYMAN ABBOTT 

and 

Dl^ WASHINGTON GLADDEN 




(9) 




The BOOKS 



HE following three books are supplied by 
The Booklovers Library to Club Members 
who have enrolled for Course XVII. 



/. THE NEW EPOCH FOR FAITH 

(George A. Gordon) 



//. MODERN CRITICISM AND THE 
PREACHING OF THE OLD 
TESTAMENT 

(George Adam Smith) 



///. JESUS CHRIST AND THE SOCIAL 
QUESTION 

(Francis Greenwood Peabody) 



The course of reading as outlined in this handbook 
is based on these books. A supplementary list^ recom- 
mended by Dr. Lyman Abbott, will be found at the 
end 



(II) 



Current Religious Thought 
TALKS and LECTURES 

by 

HENRY COLLIN MINTON 

and 

H. W. THOMAS 

and 

SAMUEL D. McCONNELL 

and 

THEODORE T. MUNGER 

and 

WILLIAM DeWITT HYDE 

and 

AMORY H. BRADFORD 

The papers by Dr. Minton^ Dr. Thomas^ Dr. McConnell^ 
Dr. Munger and Dr. Bradford have been pre- 
pared especially for readers of this course. 



EDITORIAL NOTES 

by 

LYMAN P. POWELL 



(■3) 




A WORD from THE DIRECTOR 



HE selection of books for an adequate 

and authoritative presentation of current 

religious thought is manifestly a difficult 

task. We committed this responsibility 

with entire confidence to Dr. Lyman 

Abbott and Dr. Washington Gladden, 

and we feel that our readers will share 

our satisfaction in the result. 

The books furnished with this course represent 

three important phases of the general subject of 

religious thought. Gordon presents the subject 

from the philosophic point of view ; Ge:rge Adam 




(15) 



A Word from the Director 

Smith gives us the outcome of the higher criticism 
of the Old Testament ; Peabody deals with the 
application of Christian principles to the solution 
of present social problems. 

The books we put into the hands of our readers 
have received the ?nost cordial approval of both 
of the authorities whom we consulted, Dr, 
Abbott co?m?iends Gordon s New Epoch for 
Faith as ^' fjiodern, spiritual, profound, but popu- 
lar. The style is clear and often genuinely 
eloquent!' In reco?}imending S?7iitH s Modern 
Criticism and the Preaching of the Old Tes- 
tament T)r. Gladden says: ''It seemed to me 
that one book on the Bible, giving the modern view 
of it, was essential ; and S??iitljs book is scholarly, 
and popular, and reverent.'' And of Peabody s 
Jesus Christ and the Social Question T)r. 
Gladden writes: ''It is a beautiful exposition of 
Christianity on its social side.'' 

We believe that the three books which we sup- 
ply constitute the very best available treatment of 
current religious thought for our special purpose, 
but we have taken pains to offer i?i the hand- 
book abundant suggestion for the student who is 
stimulated to undertake a broader course of read- 
ing. 0?i pages i^g—i6o the reader will find 
a list of books specially recommended by Dr. 



A Word from the Director 



Lyman Abbott. Moreover, Dr. Bradford offers 
numei'oiis bibliographical hints in his article, and 
Dr, Munger gives the last pages of his paper 
to a discussion of important books. 

In addition, we have a special article devoted 
to a survey of the field of religious literature. 
Under the title, The Wider Outlook, the Rev. 
Lyman P. Powell indicates by the topical method 
the 7710 St profitable supple772entary reading for the 
student who regards our course as an introduction 
to more serious wor^:. The Illustrative Selections 
have bee72 chosen with nice discrimination by 
Mr. Powell to illuminate points 77iade in his 
discussion. 

The papers of the course 7ieed no com77ient. 
We sought to represent both wise conservatism 
and rational radicalis7n, ajid a glance at the 
names of the contributors will assure the student 
that we have accomplished our purpose. 



2 1 (17) 



The Idea of the Course 




LL the ways of thought lead to religion. 
jj^ There is no escape from its problems. 
They must be met and attacked. Man's 
place in nature, man's place in eternity, 
immortahty, God — these and kindred 
topics have a fascination, subtle, imper- 
ative, persistent, all inclusive. 

This course aims to meet the needs 
of the general reader, but it has also 
been framed for men and women trained to think 
about theological questions, and the books chosen 
have peculiar claims on the confidence of those 
who pursue the course with serious purpose to 
avail themselves of all its possibilities. 

It hardly need be said that The Booklovers 
Library represents neither conservatism nor rad- 
icalism. We have no thesis to maintain and no 
school of theology to sustain or discredit. We 
desire simply to present the best that men are 
thinking and writing about religion. Is there 
really a resurgence of faith after the long calm of 
spiritual apathy, or the storm of doubt ? What 
is left after modern criticism has had its way with 
the Scriptures? Is there at last a real knowl- 
edge dawning as to the social teachings of our 
Lord ? These questions and others of vital im- 
port the course will help the reader to answer for 
himself. 



(19) 



,^^1 


/A 00 


VSD 


Hi 


If 


¥ 


1 


^^ 1 




iJZ/V^r.S' yiJVD SUGGESTIONS TO 
THE READER 



m 



The three books offered are typical. They do 
not exhaust the field of current theological litera- 
ture, but they start the reader on the right way. 
It would be well, first, to read the books in the 
order in which the titles are given, then, adhering 
closely to the topics, to verify or challenge each 
heading or sub-heading till the main points are 
firmly fastened in the mind. 

The questions and the list of subjects for essays 
are only suggestive. The reader who has mastered 
the three books will find that subjects and ques- 
tions will beat in upon his mind with every page 
he turns. He will be capable of caring for him- 
self 

In the study of current religious thought it is of 
first importance that one should be in a proper 
frame of mind. For a proper appreciation of 
the truth that the mental attitude " counts for 
more than the clear-cut conviction and positive 
creed which one brings to his task," the reader is 



(21) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



referred to the lucid paper contributed to this 
course by Dr. Henry C. Minton. 

The past century has been one of unsettiing 
and transition. Faith has lost her ancient per- 
spective ; her one-time groupings are dissolved ; 
her new groupings are not yet arranged. Across 
the storm of modern doubt a deeper voice is 
sounding, but some have not yet heard it. They 
need a word of hope and confidence. They need to 
understand that the eternal realities are as real as 
ever ; that, though institutions may perish and con- 
ventional morality change, the spirit which creates 
all institutions, the essential morals which under- 
lie the conventions of a day, still exist, and as 
long as they live religion cannot pass away. Dr. 
H. W. Thomas gives vigorous expression to 
these ideas in the paper which he has written for 
this handbook. 

The new century finds the organized religious 
life of the western world broken up into Roman 
Catholicism, Protestantism, and the Christianity 
represented by the Church of England and the 
American Episcopal Church. But outside of or- 
ganized Christianity there are many who seem to 
prefer the freedom they find there. Some are re- 
ligious, some are indifferent, some are avowedly 
irreligious. Few of the many who have attempted 
to analyze the situation have shown an equal ap- 

(22) 



Current Religious Thought 

preciation of the feeling of those outside the 
Church and those within. Our paper by Dr. 
McConnell has significance because he under- 
stands the situation and writes with the charm 
and lucidity which make all his writings standard 
literature. 

There are still some who hark back to the good 
old days when nothing was in doubt except the 
salvation of unbaptized infants and who close 
their eyes to the transitions of the time as though 
the world stood still. For them Dr. Theodore 
T. Munger has a word to say. No one can read 
his paper without realizing that many, if not all, 
of our most thoughtful theologians are shifting 
from the traditional viewpoint to the evolutional 
and are accepting the methods, if not all the re- 
sults, of the literary interpretation of the Bible as 
both necessary and helpful to the understanding 
of the Scriptures. 

Of course, there are some who think that be- 
cause evolution and modern criticism have given 
us a larger world, there is no longer any possi- 
bility of defining and systematizing religious 
truth. To such. President Hyde's paper, re- 
printed from his luminous book, God' s Education 
of Man, must give pause and furnish food for seri- 
ous thought. It shows that the work of intel- 
lectual destruction has gone far enough ; that the 

(23) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



real work of the new century is to be construc- 
tive and is already begun. 

In making up a budget of specially prepared 
papers to introduce and illustrate this course, it 
was important to have in mind the needs of those 
who wish to learn very quickly where to lay em- 
phasis on current religious thinking. Dr. A. H. 
Bradford stands in the vanguard of interpreters 
of faith in twentieth century terminology ; and his 
comprehensive paper covers the whole field and 
will serve as an excellent resume of the case 
covered by this course. 

If the reader desires to pursue the course be- 
yond the limits of the three books supplied by 
the Library, it will perhaps be best to adhere 
'closely to the topical suggestions of The Wider 
Outlook, on pages 1 19-133. The editor has 
therein brought to bear upon the three books of 
the course information gleaned from a score or 
more of books, chosen because they are repre- 
sentative rather than exhaustive, chosen with no 
purpose to discredit other good books in the 
field. 



(24) 



TOPICAL OUTLINE 

F THE CO U R S E 



(25) 



Topical Outline of the Course: 
Part I. The New Epoch for 

Faith by GEORGE A. GORDON 

I. Assumptions that Underlie the 

Course. Chap. I. 

''The being of God, the moi^al order of the 
world, the worth of history, the immortality of 
m,an, a^id the social life beyond time are funda- 
7nental assumptions y (9) 

II. The New Humanism. Chap. II. 

'' Slowly and iii spite of all opposiiig forces life 
itself has been winning the chief place in 
thoughtr (28) 

1. Obstructions. 32-53. 

2. Steady growth. 53-60. 

3. Witnesses to its coming. 60-101. 

III. The New Appreciation of Chris- 
tianity. Chap. III. 

'^Christianity has waited for the comi7ig of 7nan 
to himself iji order to declare its character!' 
(104) 

I. The two ways to God. 102-124. 

(27) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

2. The ultimate irresistibleness of Chris- 
tianity. 124-169. 

3. Because Christianity is Christ. 169-182. 

IV. The Discipline of Doubt. Chap. IV. 

''The doubt of the world, the long and sore agi- 
tations of history, the sad intensity of the nega- 
tive intellect in the nineteenth century is for no 
other purpose than to free the essential from the 
unessential, the abiding truth from the beggarly 
elefnents, the eter^ial gospel from the vanishing 
traditions of men!' (245) 

1. Doubt is essentially distrust. 189. 

2. But it persists. 191-203. 

3. Its sources. 203-225. 

4. Its supreme services to faith. 225-245. 

V. The Return of Faith. Chap. V. 

''Something in maji moves that way, and even 
when arrested it seldo^n desists or dies, but bides 
its time!' (247) 

1. For "man is a religious animal." 
246-259. 

2. The return is to Christian faith. 261-280. 

3. And to humanity. 280-290. 

VI. The New Help History Gives. 

Chap. VI. 

. ' 'And the help zuhich comes to faith is through 
the new conception of history as the for^n that 

(28) 



Current Religious Thought 

reality has take^i ; it comes in the old ways of 
sentiment, Inmto?^, ethical wisdom, ajid religious 
insight!' (298) 

1. The modern meaning of history. 294— 
299. 

2. History and sentiment. 299-315. 

3. '' '' humor. 315-350- 

4. '' '' conscience. 351-373. 

5. ** " the religious instinct. 374- 

381. 

VII. Things Expected. Chap. VII. 

'' In the discipline of the nineteenth century, what 
has occurred, however, is 7tot the expulsion but 
the sobering, the piLrifi cation of expectation!' 

{383) 

1. Humanity to influence faith more pro- 
foundly. 387-390. 

2. Faith to influence humanity more vitally. 
390-392. 

3. Not probation but education to be recog- 
nized as the purpose of life. 392-396. 

4. Life to grow more ethical and more 
hopeful. 396-398. 

5. Fundamental assumptions to be progres- 
sively verified. 398. 

6. Contradiction of hope to be resolved 
into vaster fulfilment. 399-402. 



(29) 



Topical Outline of the Course: 

Part II. Modern Criticism and 

the Preaching of the Old Tes- 
tament by GEORGE ADAM SMITH 

VIII. The Christian Right of Biblical 

Criticism. Lecture I. 

" Those who have been led into unbelief by mod- 
ern criticism are not for one moment to be com- 
pared in nimtber with those who have fallen 
from faith over the edge of the opposite extreme!' 

(25) 

1. The growth of the Old Testament 
canon gradual. 7-10. 

2. It bears the authority of Christ himself. 
10. 

3. Who was also its first critic. 11-14. 

4. As were the apostles too. 14-23. 

5. But the Church has sometimes fallen 
into literalism. 23-28. 

IX. The Course and Character of 
Modern Criticism. Lecture II. 

' ' Mode7ni Criticism has won its war agaijist the 
Traditional Theories. It only remains to fix 
the a^nount of the indemnity. " (72) 

(30) 



Current Religious Thought 

1. Not new. 31-46. 

2. Mainly historical. 46-56. 

3. Criticism and archeology. 56-70. 

X. What is Left of the Old Testament 
after Criticism? Lecture III. 

'' The first tJiing to rally oicr minds is to re- 
member how small a portion, after all, of the 
Old Testament has beeii affected!' (76) 

1. Of the Hexateuch. 89-108. 

2. Of Judges. ']^. 

3. Of Samuel and Kings. 77-84. 

4. Of the Prophets. 85. 

5. Of the Psalms. 86-89. 

6. Of Jonah. 89. 

XI. Is Belief in a Divine Revelation 

Left ? Lecture IV. 

''We caniiot doubt that the history of early 
Israel, as critically interpreted, was a7i authen- 
tic and a unique stage in the process of Revela- 
tion — that Israel zvere receiving through their 
national God real impressio7is of the character 
and mind of the Deity. " ( 1 43) 

1. The claims the Old Testament makes 
to divine inspiration. 1 1 i-i 14. 

2. Modern criticism confirms these claims 
by shifting the viewpoint. 115. 

(31) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

3. Renan's ** monotheism theory" over- 
turned. 1 18-12 1. 

4. Forces in Israel making for monotheism. 
121-126. 

5. Only revelation can explain the appear- 
ance of monotheism in Israel alone of 
all Semitic people. 126-144. 

XII. The Spirit of Christ in the Old 

Testament. Lecture V. 

'' The length and the breadth, the height and 
the depth of it belong to the Old Testamenf s 
revelatio7i of God himself. " (176) 

1. Before David. 148-157. 

2. In the prophets' time. 158-176. 

XIII. The Hope of Immortality in 
the Old Testament. Lecture VI. 

" Whatever hopes of immortality arose in Israel 
arose by development from the native principles 
of Israel' s religion^ (207) 

1. The data. 1 78-191. 

2. The tribal explanation. 191-202. 

3. The emergence of hope. 202-208. 

XIV. The Preaching of the Prophets. 

Lecture VII. 
" The ulthnate fou7itahi of the prophetic 
preaching is the passio7t to wiji me^i, " (281) 

(32) 



Current Religious Thought 

1. Influence on the social ethics of Chris- 
tianity. 215-265. 

2. Their ideal of a national religion. 265— 
274. 

3. The absence of miracles. 274-279. 

4. Their style. 279-282. 

XV. The Wisdom Literature, Lecture 
VIII. 

' ' T/ie mass of it seems to be post-exilic. " (286) 

1. The wise men and the prophets com- 
pared. 287-292. 

2. The Book of Job. 293-300. 

3. The Book of Proverbs. 300-314. 



(33) 



Topical Outline of the Course: 
Part iw.Jesus ChHst and the So- 
cial ^estion by f. g. peabody 

XVI. The Social Question. Chap. I. 

" It is the age of tJie social question. '' (3) 

1. Its commanding position. 1-9. 

2. Its ethical character. 9-21. 

3. Plans to Christianize it. 21-52. 

4. The attitude of Jesus. 52-75. 

XVII. The Social Principles of Jesus. 
Chap. II. 

" TJie social teaching of fesics Christ is this, 
that the social orde7^ is not a product of mecJian- 
isni but of personality, and that personality ful- 
fils itself only in tJie social order'' (102) 

1. The primary purpose of Jesus. 76-91. 

2. The doctrine of the kingdom. 91-104. 

3. Its application. 104-128. 

XVIII. Concerning the Family. Chap. 
III. 

' ' The teaching of fesus, so sligJitly accepted in 
many zvays of life, has actitally taken firm root 
in the soil of the family ^ (182) 

I. The dom.estic instability of today. 129- 
133, 161-166, 171-179- 

(34) 



Current Religious Thought 

2. The history of the family. 135-144. 

3. Jesus emphasizes the family relation- 
ship. 144-15 1. 

4. His specific teachings. 151-161. 

5. Hopeful signs. 166-170. 

6. The ideal. 180-182. 

XIX. Concerning the Rich. Chap. IV. 

' ' He does 710 1 p7^esent a scheme of economic re- 
arrangement ; he issues a summons to the king- 
doin^ (215) 

1. The largeness of the question. 1 83-1 91. 

2. The varying testimony of the Gospels. 
191-201. 

3. The social environment of Jesus. 202- 
208. 

4. Apparent conflict of his utterances. 
208-215. 

5. The three Christian uses of wealth. 
217-225. 

XX. Concerning the Poor. Chap. V. 

'* The tra7isition made by the ministry of Jesus 
in the history of philanthropy is hardly less 
remarkable than the transitio7i made in the his- 
tory of theology. " (226) 

1. The attitude of the ancient world. 226- 
231. 

2. The conduct of the Church. 231, 235- 
238. 



(35) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

3. Secular charity today. 233. 

4. Preliminary aspects of Jesus' teachings. 
238-247. 

5. Individualized as seen in scientific char- 
ity. 248-258. 

6. The real aim of Jesus always to give 
power. 258-266. 

XXI. Concerning the Industrial Or- 
der. Chap. VI. 

" If any 7^evol7ttion in the mdtis trial oi'der is to 
overthrow the existing economic system, tJie new 
order 77ms t depe7id for its pe7n7ia7ience 07i the 
pri7iciples of the teachi7ig of Jesus ; but if the 
principles of the teachi7ig of fesits sJwitld co77ie to 
co7itrol the existi7ig eco7iomic system, a rcvolutio7i 
in the iiidustrial order would seem to be U7i7teces- 
saryr (325) 

1. The industrial problem. 268-273. 

2. Was the teaching of Jesus specific ? 
273-276. 

3. He views the problem from above. 
276-280. 

4. He begins with the individual. 280-285. 

5. A seeming contradiction dissipated. 
287-299. 

6. His transcendent optimism. 300-314. 

7. Its realization through service. 314- 
^26. 



(36) 



Current Religious Thought 

XXII. The Correlation of the Social 
Questions. Chap. VII. 

" TJie relation of the social questions with each 
other is not that of 7nere sequence or expansion ; 
it is one of mutual depe^idence and transfer- 
ability!' (328) 

1. Appreciation of correlation necessary to 
true philanthropy. Z'^l-ZZ?)- 

2. No panacea for social ills. 2i?)c>~?)?)S' 

3. Doctrine of correlation a stimulus to 
efforts for social betterment. 335-340. 

4. The larger teaching of the doctrine of 
correlation. 340-343. 

5. Social progress the expression of moral 
energy. 343-347- 

6. Directing social energy. 347-351. 

7. The Christian Church the social dynamic. 
351-359. 



(37) 




7 / 



WASHINGTON GLADDEN 



The Frame of Mind for 

Religious Study: A Talk 

BY HENRY COLLIN MINTON 



(39) 



The Frame of Mind for 

Religious Study: A Talk 

BY HENRY COLLIN MINTON 



Rev. Henry Collin Minton is a native of 
Pennsylvania, and was graduated from Wash- 
ington and Jefferson College in 1879. For seven 
years he held the pastorate of the First Presby- 
terian Church, San Jose, Cal., and since 1892 he 
has been Stuart professor of systematic theology 
in the San Francisco Theological Seminary. His 
Christianity Super7iatural, published in 1900, 
strengthened the literary reputation previously 
acquired by his scholarly contributions to the 
various religious periodicals. Dr. Minton was 
moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly 
* in 1901. 

In the study of current religious thought it is a 
matter of the greatest importance that the 
student be in a proper frame of mind in coming 
to his pursuit. Not unfrequently this frame of 
mind counts for more than the clear-cut convic- 
tions and positive creed which one brings to his 
task. Indeed, it has a very great part in determin- 
ing what those convictions shall be. It is not very 
easy to define exactly what this frame of mind is. 
It has to do with the prejudices and preconceptions 
which one brings with him. That we all have 
these goes without the saying, and often to deny 
them in words is to prove all the more clearly to 
others the fact that they exist. It is a sort of mental 

(41) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

attitude. One may be hospitable or hostile; one may 
be open-minded or unapproachable. We are not 
now at all referring to that distinctively devotional 
frame which makes its possessor personally reli- 
gious, but to that mental condition which the 
ordinary student who comes to the study of reli- 
gious questions as a matter of common intelligence 
ought to possess. There must be a measure of 
sympathy with the subject. This is always indis- 
pensable to genuine progress. Renan thought 
that if any man is to be an impartial judge of a 
religion, he must once have accepted it and after- 
wards have renounced it. We do not believe this. 
Not doubt but faith, not hostility but sympathy, is 
a qualification in the student of any sul^ject. A 
man must love Shakespeare if he is to be a good 
student of that master. No one ever achieved 
eminence in science who was not a lover of nature. 
There is nowhere enthusiasm without sympathy, 
and there is no success without enthusiasm. 

In this frame of mind two extremes are pos- 
sible. One is that of denying at the start the 
distinctively sacred elements in religion. To be 
sure, everything is sacred in a sense, but religion 
is in a peculiar sense sacred. To deny this is to 
annihilate religion at once. If religion is but a 
bare item in the vast program of nature, then 
we may as well take down the distinguishing sig- 
nal and address ourselves to the study of natural 
science at once and for all. This is no special 

(42) 



Current Religious Thought 

pleading. What we are saying is that no one who 
comes to the study of rehgious Hterature with the 
idea in his mind that rehgion, as such, is an empty 
or meaningless thing can ever catch the spirit of 
religious thought. The scientist must surrender 
himself to nature's charms ; the reader must lend 
himself to his author's leading ; the student of 
religious literature must get e7i rapport with the 
underflowing currents of religious thought. 

The other extreme is that of regarding religious 
spheres as intrinsically insulated from all others. 
It is a mistake too often made to suppose that 
our religious convictions are to be wholly exempt 
from the common tests of our believing. Reli- 
gion has no franchise to violate the laws of sound 
thinking any more than of pure living. What is 
true in religion cannot be false in geology or 
astronomy or philosophy. There is no barbed- 
wire fence between the fields of religion and any 
other territory. All truth is one. No truth can 
contradict any other. If there be a contradiction, 
then there is falsehood at one end or the other, 
possibly both. Pascal said that truth on this side 
of the Pyrenees is error on that, and Pascal was 
wrong. The Creator has never authorized the 
prohibition to be placarded on any field he has 
made, 'T<eep off the grass." What is truth in 
the skies of the astronomer or in the crucibles of 
the chemist cannot be false at the altar of the 
priest or in the lecture room of theology. There 

(43) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

is then no quarrel between faith and reason, be- 
tween reUgion and philosophy. 

And yet we are to remember that we cannot 
know all that is to be known. The higher the 
heights of our climbing, the broader the horizons 
of our knowledge which bound the wider ex- 
panses of our ignorance. Especially is this true 
in the high spheres of rehgion. Our eyesight is 
defective and our rangre is limited. The feeble- 
ness and finiteness of our faculties soon admonish 
us of the impossibility of compassing the wide 
fields which stretch in kaleidoscopic panorama 
before us. Intellectual humility is the lesson. 
Bigotry has slippery standing ground in the pres- 
ence of mighty truths whose magnitude chal- 
lenges and defies man's noblest powers of com- 
prehension. Questions of origin and destiny, of 
the pre-conscious past and the post viortem future, 
of time and space, of eternity and God, are ever 
present to the thoughtful mind, and yet that mind 
constantly realizes that the ranges they present 
are larger than its powers of compassing or of 
measuring. Omnia in mysteintmi exennt. This 
is the verdict of science, of philosophy, and of 
religion. 

But here again we need a caution. We must 
not leap to the quick conclusion that because we 
cannot know all, therefore we cannot know any- 
thing. I may see Sirius or Orion in a crystal, 
unclouded, midniofht skv, and vet there are a 



(44) 



Current Religious Thought 

thousand things which are true about those stars 
which I cannot see. A child may play on the 
banks of a great ocean and never dream of its 
vast stretches to remote shores ; it truly sees the 
ocean but not all of the ocean. We know really 
a great many things which we do not know ex- 
haustively. When I see the old pyramid of 
Cheops on the banks of the Nile, I know abso- 
lutely a few things about it, but concerning the 
questions of its age and origin and design, I may 
be in utter and entire ignorance. My ignorance 
concerning the nine hundred and ninety-nine 
things does not discount my certain knowledge 
of the few things which I know that I know. A 
ton of ignorance counts nothing against a penny- 
weight of assured knowledge. 

No man knows all about religion, but the 
things he does not know cannot affect what he 
does know. If the saint knows one thing gen- 
uinely, all the ignorance of the sage cannot upset 
him. Here is the golden line of distinction be- 
tween humility and agnosticism, between faith 
and skepticism. The discerning student of cur- 
rent religious thought will encounter this distinc- 
tion again and again. Their name is legion 
who have ignored it or denied it. Plato said 
that all philosophy is born of wonder. So, 
too, wonder has its place in religion. There is a 
world of difference, as Coleridge has told us, 
between a mystery and a contradiction. The 

(45) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

one invites faith, the other kills it. If I could 
exhaustively know God, he would be smaller than 
my power of knowing. The divine must have in 
it an irreducible element of mystery to the human. 
Religion will cease to be religious when it ceases 
to be wonderful to the human mind ; if all the 
problems of the soul were completely solved by 
the soul, then the soul would dismiss the ministries 
with the mysteries of religion. Quite to the con- 
trary, the more fully men know God, the more 
devoutly they believe in him ; the more the 
mind grasps in the supernal spheres of religious 
truth, the more completely is it enraptured in 
their heavenliness and their purity. 

All this the student must bring with him ; it is 
a part of the mental equipment with which he 
begins. He probably has not reasoned it out for 
himself, but it will be implicit in his "frame of 
mind." Without it he will be out of harmony 
v\^ith the leading, healthful currents of present-day 
religious thought ; with it. he will be ready to 
catch the spirit and to estimate the tendencies 
which are at work in the ever-restless, ever-invit- 
ing, ever-rewarding spheres of religious literature 
and thought. 



"V 



(46) 



The Deeper Foundations : 

A Talk BY H. W. THOMAS 



(47) 



The Deeper Foundations : 

A Talk BY H. W. THOMAS 



Rev. Hiram Washington Thomas, D.D., a 
native of Virginia, began his career as a preacher 
in the Methodist Church. He held advanced ideas 
which were deemed dangerously radical by his 
denomination, and his connection with the Meth- 
odist Church was severed in 1881. For the last 
twenty years he has been pastor of the People's 
Church, McVicker's Theatre, Chicago. He is 
widely known as a pulpit orator and as a writer. 
His Origi7i and Destiny of Man and The People' s 
Pulpit are the most noteworthy of his books. 

Consciousness affirms self and other ; says, 
I am ; the world is. This is primary know- 
ing ; It cannot be proved, nor can It be denied. 
The affirmation of consciousness is final. 

Not only is there no way of escape from the 
facts of self and other ; there is a conscious rela- 
tion between the self and the other, between man 
and his world. He must eat and drink and 
breathe ; he must work with the forces of nature. 
And just as literally is the mind related to its cor- 
responding world of reason, of truth and beauty ; 
and the heart is related to the right, the moral 
order of the good. 

When we thus think of man and his wonderful 
surroundings, it is not strange that there has been 
among all the peoples of the past that something 
called the religious. It has always been and will 

41 (49) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



be, a part of the nature and the need of such a life. 
At first it was more a feeling than any reasoned 
faith that between the soul and its vast surround- 
ings of the upper and unknown there was some 
possible relation and way of approach ; that man 
in his needs and longings, fears and hopes, might 
have help from above ; that the self could cry out 
to the other. Without some such feeling or faith 
as this there would be no such thing as religion, 
as prayer, or any form of worship. 

In so far, or at bottom, all religions are one. 
But now comes the question. What are this self 
and this other ? Consciousness simply affirms the 
facts ; then reason attempts to define the facts. 
Psychology gives its definitions of mind ; science 
explains the laws and properties of nature. The- 
ology deals more with ontology, or being, than 
with cosmology, or world ; it tries to define the 
qualities of the Infinite, or the being of God. Out 
of such attempted definitions naturally arose the 
great world-religions ; the Brahmanic and the 
Buddhist, the Confucian, the Zoroastrian, the Jewish 
and the Christian, and the later Mohammedan. 
And out of these have arisen Romanism and 
Protestantism, the orthodox and the liberal, with 
their creeds and confessions and their different 
forms of worship. And out of all have arisen the 
doubts and denials of the many who could not 
accept the teachings of this or that church or 
school of theology. 

(50) 



Current Religious Thought 



Some such reflections seem proper and neces- 
sary in any study of the questions of current 
religious thought ; necessary, to safeguard the 
great realities of religion and to set In clearer 
light the controversies about religion. In our age 
of transition and general unsettling it should be 
emphasized that the facts, the eternal realities of 
the real, are not in books and systems but in the 
world beyond the books. Geology is in the earth, 
in the rocks and fossils ; astronomy is in the stars; 
and not in the books about these subjects. The 
earth and the stars waited for reason to come 
along and correct the errors of the senses, of false 
theories, and to tell the story of their existence as 
it has been and is. And so of religion ; its real 
foundations are not in books and theories, but in 
the nature and needs of man and the answering 
fulness of the Infinite ; in the soul and God. The 
Bible did not make religion ; the Church did not 
make religion : religion was born, not made — born 
out of the need and cry of souls — and in its grow- 
ing life has created its Bible and churches. 

There should be no fears that religion will 
perish from the earth ; were all its institutional 
forms destroyed, human lives, journeying beneath 
the stars from cradle to tomb, would dream and 
hope and pray in the great hours of sorrow and 
joy. Prescrlptional morality may change ; forms 
of education may pass away ; but essential 
morals, the morals of right relations between 



(51) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



man and man, and man and God, can never 
change ; they are a part of the very constitution 
of things. 

Self and other and right relation are facts, 
facts in the nature of things, hence not debata- 
ble ; the only question is that of definition : and 
with the growth of ideas, of the rational and 
moral consciousness of mankind, we should ex- 
pect changes in religious beliefs as well as in 
other things. Science has given us the new as- 
tronomy and geology ; sociology is giving us the 
larger meanings and applications of liberty and 
social justice ; evolution is revealing the ascent of 
life from lower to higher forms ; higher criticism 
has swept through the fields of history and litera- 
ture. Religion has been the last to feel, in any 
wide and popular sense, the effects of these great 
changes ; and now that they are felt along all the 
old lines of belief and the new faith is finding 
larger acceptance, many good people fear that it 
means >the loss of faith. Religion is so largely a 
matter of sentiment, of feeling, that these depart- 
ures from the old cause great suffering to parents, 
teachers, and pastors ; and in this we should all 
sympathize. But they and all should reflect that 
this is a living, growing world, and that in the 
history of thought the changes that were dreaded 
as loss of faith have proved to be great gains. 
It was so with the new astronomy and geology; 
and while the higher criticism will compel many 

(52) 



Current Religious Thought 



changes of old beliefs about the Bible, with these 
will go the perplexing difficulties and doubts, and 
the great spiritual verities of the Bible as the 
Book of Life will remain and will be a greater 
power in the world. 

We should not be afraid to trust truth, nor afraid 
to trust the soul and God. It was a mistake, a 
want of faith, that led the minds of the past to 
try to bind the faith of the future. It is a mistake 
to claim authority, the authority of a council or a 
creed, for truth. These have their values, but 
should not be made binding upon the reason and 
conscience. Truth is its own authority. What 
we need is to see that these old doctrines repre- 
sent the thinking of a past, just as did the old 
theories of astronomy, chemistry, or govern- 
ment ; but that the world of the real is ever open 
and near, and that each soul should find its 
answerings in the life of God. And to these 
seekers of truth should be made plain the fact 
that it is not necessary to believe these old inter- 
pretations ; that they may be left behind, and the 
world v/ith lighter and gladder feet go forward 
upon the highways of a larger and better faith 
and hope. 

The studies in current religious thought are 
nearly all forward looking. The old debates of 
the darker past have little place in the life of the 
present. Of course, royalty and ecclesiasticism 
are trying to cling to the old ideas ; but the 

(53) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



democracy of government and religion looks to 
the life of the free. In Germany, the intuitional 
school of Schleiermacher and Ritschl is coming 
into the foreground of thought ; the facts of a 
special religious consciousness and of religion as 
an experience are being emphasized. Philosoph- 
ical idealism, Christian science, theosophy, faith 
healing are all phases of the spiritual self with 
vision turned to the spiritual in the other self of 
the universe. Science, with its perceptive reason, 
is doing a vast service in revealing the order of 
the material world ; the miraculous is coming to 
be seen as the higher natural ; faith is coming to 
rest upon the order of things ; and we are com- 
ing to think of God as in nature, in his world and 
not outside of it. It is hardly possible now to 
think of a quantitative God, and the thought of a 
qualitative God, of God as the universal reason, 
truth, justice, love, life, was never so consciously 
near and real as in these great years. This is the 
new conscience of humanity, the new sociology 
and religion of social justice, of right relations, of 
love to man and God. 



i54) 



WHAT FORM SHALL 
CHRISTIANITY TAKE? 

A Lecture by s. d. McCONNELL 



(55) 



WHAT FORM SHALL 
CHRISTIANITY TAKE? 

A Lecture by s. D. McCONNELL 



Rev. Samuel D. McConnell, Archdeacon of 
northern Brooklyn, and rector of Holy Trinity 
in the same city, was for fourteen years prior to 
1896 rector of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, 
Philadelphia. During the nine years immediately 
following his ordination in 1873, before his call to 
Philadelphia, Dr. McConnell held rectorships at 
Erie, Pa., Watertown and Middletown, Conn. He 
is a graduate of Washington and Jefferson College, 
and received the degree of D.D. from the Univer- 
sity of Pennsylvania and of D.C.L. from Hobart. 
He is also a fellow of the Royal Victoria Institute, 
of Great Britain. Dr. McConnell is the author of 
some half dozen notable volumes on religious 
subjects, his Histoiy of the American Episcopal 
CJiurch having passed through a number of edi- 
tions. Ttie Evolution of Immortality, published 
in 1901, is a most important contribution to the 
literature of religious thought. 

At the opening of the twentieth century the 
organized rehgious life of the western 
world dwells in the fortress of Roman Catholi- 
cism, the scattered camps of Protestantism, and 
the medieval building, half cathedral and half 
parliament house, of the English and American 
Episcopal Church. These three expressions of 
Christianity are not greatly unequal in importance. 
Importance is the product reached by the multipli- 
es?) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

cation of numbers by weight. By this method of 
arithmetic the result in all these cases will not be 
far from equal. 

But outside all these organizations there is a 
vast and steadily increasing number of religious 
folk who prefer to live out of doors. Their 
religion is Christianity in the main, but is Chris- 
tianity without a church and without a creed. 
This class Is being continually recruited. For 
a generation past these recruits have come 
mainly from the churches. They have been peo- 
ple who were born and reared in some ecclesias- 
tical organization, but whose attachment to it 
grew gradually weaker until it ended in their final 
separation. They have never been excommuni- 
cated ; they have simply dropped out. There are 
in the country tens of thousands of men whose 
names were once borne on church rolls but have 
been dropped therefrom for no other cause than 
prolonged absence. I know several hundred such 
men myself. In many cases, no doubt, their lapse 
has been due to a growing indifference to religion 
in itself; but in most cases their religious life, never 
very ardent, is as earnest as it ever was, but they 
do not any longer find any use for church ordi- 
nances or sacraments. They are found chlefiy at 
the two ends of the social spectrum, that is, in the 
most highly educated and cultivated class, and in 
the laboring class. On the one hand they are 
college presidents, cabinet officers, judges, law- 

(58) 



Current Religious Thought 

yers, editors, doctors, literary men and women, 
college professors, teachers, correspondents, poli- 
ticians, legislators and such like. Let anyone 
whose acquaintance is large among this class call 
to mind the actual attitude of the men he know^s, 
and he will possibly be surprised to find how 
great a proportion of them is in the religious posi- 
tion named. At the other end of the scale is to 
be found a far more numerous class in much the 
same position. The working men and their 
leaders, however, are much less friendly to the 
Church in their estrangement from her. They are 
very poorly informed concerning the Church's 
actual doctrines, practices and temper, and are in 
the main inclined to be hostile. 

Just at present this unchurched religious class 
is being swelled with enormous rapidity from two 
sources. In the first place the children of a gen- 
eration which dropped out of the Church have 
now grown to m.an's estate. In the second place 
that tradition and social compulsion which, ever 
since Constantine's time, has held the multitude 
up to at least a normal church connection is 
rapidly disappearing. The result is that the 
Church at the opening of the twentieth century 
confronts a situation the like of which she has not 
before been called upon to face since the fourth 
century. The question before her is whether or 
not she can stop the exodus and regain control of 
the religious life of the people. 

(59) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

The problem is one of more than ecclesiastical 
interest. The moral and social welfare of society 
is deeply concerned with it. An institution as 
large as the Christian Church, which has been for 
so many centuries accepted as the arbiter of the 
moral life of society, could not be set aside with- 
out the most far-reaching effects, good or bad, 
upon the common life of men. Neither the eccle- 
siastic nor the statesman seems at all adequately 
to appreciate the gravity of the situation. The 
churchman satisfies himself wdth compiling statis- 
tics from which he extracts the comfortable de- 
duction that his own denomination, at any rate, is 
holding its own, but does not trouble himself to 
estimate with care the actual value of the figures 
with which he deals. The statesman, on the 
other hand, has no adequate conception of the 
role which the Church has played and is playing 
in the world's life. I propose to myself, there- 
fore, the task of making an estimate of the organ- 
ized form.s of Christianity now existing, Vv'ith a 
view to ascertain v/hether any one of them is 
likely to gain or to hold a dominating place in 
the religious sphere during this new century. To 
this end it will be necessary to state the distinc- 
tive aim, purpose, and policy of each one ; to ask 
how far each one is committed to its present posi- 
tion ; to inquire whether or not the Church pos- 
sesses within herself the capacity to win the 
adherence of the tvv^entieth century man. 

(6c) 



Current Religious Thought 

The organized ecclesiastical society which is 
most easy to deal with in this way is the Church 
of Rome. Her position is so well defined and 
definitely announced that in dealing with it one 
can see what he is doing. Is Rome to control 
the ecclesiastical future of Europe and America? 
I raise the question with no controversial purpose 
in mind. I wish only to marshal the facts avail- 
able in the case. If the statement of facts be 
challenged in any instance, the appeal can only be 
taken to neutral and unbiased authorities. The 
question is not even what ecclesiastical form ought 
to prevail, but which one, all things considered, 
is likely to. The claim of Rome is very easily 
stated. It is this : 

Jesus Christ organized and established a Church 
which he intended should become conterminous 
with the world. He appointed officers to ad- 
minister it. From am.ong these officers he chose 
one to whom he committed without reserve 
all the power which he himself exercised. This 
man selected Rome, the capital city, as the seat 
of his rule. By the authority committed to him 
by Christ he ordained that to his successors in the 
bishopric of Rome, regularly chosen, should be 
passed on through all time the same power to rule 
and guide the Church which he had himself re- 
ceived from his Master. By this authority the 
Bishop of Rome, better known as the Pope, be- 
comes the ''Vicegerent of God upon earth" in 

(6r) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

regularly ordained and divinely established suc- 
cession. This is Romanism. If this claim can 
make itself good or can get itself accepted, the 
question is closed. There is no room for any 
other church. The existence of any other becomes 
an impertinence, not to say a crime. Both the 
strength and the weakness of the claim are to be 
found right here. All will agree that the claim 
has been maintained with splendid consistency 
and with at least apparent success. So far as I 
am aware there is no disposition anywhere within 
that Church today to bate any whit of this de- 
mand. "Submission to the chair of Peter" Is her 
final word. It is not necessary to assume that 
this demand Is due to ecclesiastical love of power. 
We may admit that it is the natural action taken 
by a Church which sincerely believes that the Pope 
possesses this divine power derived from Christ 
through Peter. The only point which concerns 
us is whether this contention Is or is not likely 
to be admitted by those to whom it is to be 
addressed. 

One would naturally be tempted to say that 
it is at bottom only a question of history. If 
it can be shown that Christ did actually make 
such an arrangement, the matter will be settled 
for all who have a right to call themselves Chris- 
tians. There is nothing to do but submit. But 
the case is not so simple. Suppose the verdict of 
the historical experts should be given that there 

(62) 



Current Religious Thought 

is very little reason to believe that Peter was ever 
at Rome in his life ; that there is no historical 
reason whatever for believing that he transmitted 
to any successor the unique authority which 
Christ had conveyed to him ; that the Decretals 
originally used to show the supreme place al- 
lowed by the Church to the Bishop of Rome were 
forgeries. 

None of these historical decisions will greatly 
affect the situation, or at least affect it for a 
good while to come. All the historical assump- 
tions which were used originally in upbuilding the 
primacy of the Bishop of Rome may well be re- 
garded as having filled the place which the tem- 
porary wooden form does in the building of a 
stone arch. After the arch is once built the form 
may be removed and broken up if you will. It has 
served its purpose. In the case of the Roman 
Church the building has been erected. What- 
ever one may decide as to the quality of the 
material which entered into the sub-structure, 
the building itself is a very evident fact. Still 
it is well for the intelligent public to know pre- 
cisely what Roman Catholicism is and what it is 
not. It is not essentially any doctrine of the 
sacraments, or any special type of piety, or a 
priesthood, or a political power. Any of these 
things it might modify or change without losing 
identity. But the one central, elemental, con- 
structive quality is the claim that the Bishop of 

(63) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



Rome is a person divinely commissioned by Jesus 
Christ, through St. Peter, to rule and govern the 
Christian Church through all the ages. 

It is perfectly evident, therefore, that Rome 
can never make any compromise or concordat 
with any body of Christian people in their organ- 
ized capacity. She can deal only with individuals. 
Church unity, from her standpoint, is to be reached 
in no way but by all other churches surrendering 
their organization and making their submission 
as individuals. Or, what is practically the same 
thing, all the members of other churches may 
make their submission separately until there would 
be no other churches left. This is the dream and 
the hope of Romanism in Europe and America. 
Is there any likelihood of its being realized ? 

If one were to look at this country alone, without 
taking account of past history elsewhere, he would 
be inclined to say yes. The growth of the Roman 
Church in the United States is one of the most 
striking facts in history. What makes it all the 
more noteworthy is its unexpectedness. The 
unexpected is what has happened. That a new 
country, openly sworn to the principle of personal 
liberty, should have proved to be the most favor- 
able ground on earth for the growth of a Church 
openly sworn to the principle of authority is surely 
a notable thing. It is probably true that during 
the nineteenth century the actual gain to the 
Roman Church in numbers, wealth, influence and 



(64) 



Current Religious Thought 

prestige has been greater in the United States 
than in all the rest of the world together. And 
the gain is not only or chiefly in the particulars 
mentioned. She has gained the popular good 
will, or at least a favorable prepossession, and 
she has conquered respect. The attitude of the 
average Protestant toward that Church today is 
a very interesting study. He looks at her with 
a mingled feeling of admiration, distrust, envy, and 
fear. He is about equally prepared, upon cause 
being shown, to become her active enemy or her 
submissive servant. Which position he will ulti- 
mately take remains to be seen. There are 
some things which make it likely that it will be 
seen, probably, before the middle of this century. 
These things we shall notice later on. At present 
those who look upon her most favorably are that 
large and very influential class of men whose 
antecedents were Protestant but whose actual con- 
nection with Protestant churches is little more 
than nominal. They know enough of Protestant- 
ism to make them alive to its faults, and they 
know just enough of Romanism to make them 
admire its excellences. These men care little for 
the theological and ecclesiastical questions which 
separate Rome and Protestantism. But they ad- 
mire efficiency and hate slovenliness of method. 
Assuming as they do that all churches are but 
species of the same genus or really varieties of 
one species, they incline to give their adherence to 

i^ (65) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



the one which, as it seems to them, best discharges 
the function for which the Church exists. They 
are legislators, city officials, railroad men, editors, 
managers of large business interests. Whenever 
their dealings bring them in contact with a Roman 
Catholic institution, they find an organization which 
knows its own mind, knows what it wants, has 
some one who can speak for it officially and finally. 
They see that it maintains discipline among its 
own members, and seems at the same time to 
retain their affection. They are attracted, in a 
word, by its practical, businesslike efficiency, and 
are repelled by the opposite qualities in Protest- 
antism. They have not made their submission, 
and it remains to be seen whether or not they 
will, but they are favorably disposed so far as they 
are informed. 

Whether or not Rome is gaining from or losing 
to Protestantism in the aggregate is a question to 
which it is very difficult to give a reply. The 
truth here cannot be evolved from statistics at any 
rate. The real facts are of a kind which never 
can be tabulated. What can with certainty be 
said at present is that the people of this country 
generally are much better disposed than they were 
at an earlier date to submit to a Church which de- 
mands obedience. The self assertive habit of 
personal independence in every relation of life 
has been greatly weakened and promises to grow 
still feebler in our more highly organized Hfe, 

(66) 



Current Religious Thought 

where the individual continually counts for less 
and the organization for more. 

The essential principle of Protestantism is indi- 
vidual responsibility in the conduct of life and for 
the destiny of the soul. This is the reason why 
Protestantism has always insisted upon absolute 
freedom of thought and speech. It wants knowl- 
edge to grow and to be always and everywhere 
available for the individual. This is not chiefly or 
preeminently because it values knowledge on its 
own account or for the secular blessings which it 
makes possible. Learning and Protestantism 
were first linked together for a religious purpose. 
If each human being is bound in very fact to con- 
trol his own life and to work out his own salvation, 
he must have the advantage of every ray of light 
from every quarter which may illuminate his ardu- 
ous path. For the first century or more of the 
life of the Protestant churches they were faithful 
to this principle. They repudiated "authority" 
altogether. Neither the authority of a man claim- 
ing to be the vicegerent of God, nor of a Book 
claiming to be an infallible transcript of God's 
will, nor of a Church claiming dominion over the 
conduct and thought of its members was tolerated. 
It was each man face to face with the eternal 
realities. The individual men who were, each for 
himself, working out their own salvation banded 
themselves together for edification and mutual aid 
and encouragement, but no one of them resigned 

(67) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



his individual liberty or thought to transfer his 
individual responsibility. It was a high and noble 
ideal of Christianity, but it was a most exacting 
ideal, and to a large extent its members fainted 
under it. Liberty is expensive. After a century 
the Protestants began, like the people of old, to 
say to one another, " Nay, but we will have a king 
to rule over us." Little by little, and for the most 
part unconsciously, they accepted the rule of two 
"authorities " which were supposed to speak with 
the same voice. One was the doctrine of an in- 
fallible, inspired, holy Scripture. The other was 
a confession of faith or body of articles. These 
quickly came to be thought of as final arbiters. 
The minister's business was to interpret them ; 
the individual member's business, to obey them. 

This condition of things lasted without seri- 
ous challenge until about twenty-five years ago. 
Since that time Protestantism has been busy 
chiefly in seeking a way to become free from 
these authorities which itself set up. In some 
cases a church is trying to modify the terms of its 
own subscription, but generally the freedom is 
sought for by individuals, each for himself. It is 
this which gives a significance to " biblical criti- 
cism " and " doctrinal revision " as well as to the 
quiet secession of thousands of individuals from 
the Protestant churches. The Protestant churches 
are trying to rediscover the active principle of 
Protestantism. 



(68) 



Current Religious Thought 

But in this country, where Protestantism and 
Romanism have lived long in such intimate asso- 
ciation, each has been profoundly modified by the 
other. There is a Protestant movement in the 
Church of Rome and an ecclesiastical movement 
in Protestantism. Both are too real and too ob- 
vious to be ignored. The American Catholic and 
the American Protestant are both markedly dif- 
ferent from their brethren over the sea. The one 
is obedient, but it is with an obedience which pre- 
fers to have a reason ; the other is free, but with 
a freedom which he is ready to subordinate for 
sake of organization for a practical end. As far 
as one can see, neither papal absolutism nor Prot- 
estant anarchy can offer a congenial home to the 
Christian life of America. Nor, judging by all 
the past of the world's history, will religion exist 
without an outward form and organization to give 
it expression. 

If there were present a church at once free and 
well disciplined, with an honorable history to sat- 
isfy the craving for continuity and a vigorous 
present to satisfy the hope for the future, it might 
serve as a rallying ground for all parties and a 
home for souls lonely in their isolation. Some, 
and with a show of reason, have pointed to the 
Episcopal Church in connection with the mother 
Church of England as such an organization. 
Under a statesmanlike leadership and with a gen- 
erous and comprehensive spirit, it might well serve 

(69) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



this great purpose. But the prospects of its doing- 
so are not so encouraging as one would wish. 

But the rehgious problem in the United States 
for the twentieth century, the problem to which 
all sober and thoughtful persons may well address 
themselves, is clear. We are all Christians, at 
any rate. The task is to find an expression for 
our Christianity which will save it on the one hand 
from condemning the individual to spiritual servi- 
tude, and on the other hand prevent the religious 
spirit from evaporating in aimless sentimentality. 



-t/ ,s 




(70) 



The Current Phase of 

Religious Thought : A Talk 

by THEODORE T. MUNGER 



(71) 



The Current Phase of 

Religious Thought : A Talk 

by THEODORE T. MUNGER 



Rev. Theodore Thornton Munger, though a 
native of New York, has spent nearly all his long 
life in New England. His academic and theo- 
logical training were received at Yale College and 
Yale Theological Seminary, and he has been for 
nearly half a century pastor of Congregational 
churches at Dorchester, Haverhill, Lawrence and 
North Adams, Mass., and New Haven, Conn. 
At the latter place he has been in charge of the 
United Church since 1885. He received his de- 
gree of D.D. from Illinois College. In the early 
eighties he appeared before the public as an 
author. Lamps and Paths and On the Thresh- 
old are lectures for young people. His other 
publications include numerous essays, three vol- 
umes of sermons, and a life of the late Dr. Horace 
Bushnell. 

The change from one century to another so 
impresses some people as to induce the 
thought that everything is to change with it, even 
religion, which in its essence is the most perma- 
nent possession of the i;ace. As Burke puts it : 
'' Man is a religious animal ;" and again, as stated 
by Dr. George A. Gordon :. ''It is part of normal 
humanity." A French author has recently ven- 
tured so far as to write a book on The Non- 
religion of the Future, His next book should be 

(73) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



on the inversion of the firmament, for that is as 
likely to come about. 

It is not religion that changes, but forms and 
degrees of it. It has special features and phases, 
like the moon, which is always full though falling 
into shadow^s that belie it ; but they are shadows. 
The current phase of religious thought is, un- 
doubtedly, that of t7'ansition. At first sight reli- 
gion itself seems to be breaking up and dissolving; 
but a more careful look shows that its elements 
are retained and that nothing essential is passing 
out of it. There is change of form and emphasis ; 
there is growth and development ; there is doubt 
and denial and rejection, just as in the State there 
is rebellion while government goes steadily on. 
Carlyle with exquisite wit touches this point in 
the closing page of his essay on Voltaire : the 
clown kills his ass because it drank up the moon, 
seeing the reflection of it in his water pail. 

The first thing one has to do in this juncture is 
to rid one's self of fear and even of anxiety. The 
transition is not only inevitable but healthful, be- 
ing the sign and condition of life by universal 
analogy. Whatever lives changes. If religion 
should go under, it will not be because men differ 
about it or change their opinions as to what con- 
stitutes it, but because it has proved to be some- 
thing unlike what it has always seemed to be. 
The ship will sink, not because men have scuttled 
her, but because she has in herself become unsea- 



(74) 



Current Religious Thought 



worthy. Such a condition is indeed conceivable ; 
but it is more probable that the changes which 
seem to threaten her are a clearing away of barna- 
cles that foul her bottom, and a stretching 
of broader sails to the wind. More probable 
still is it that the ship is simply changing her 
course as she sails through this Scylla-and-Charyb- 
dis world. She loses motion, the sails flap in the 
wind, the water swirls around the rudder, the 
waves seem about to engulf her, but she rights 
herself, catches a fresh breeze and starts on a 
new tack, yet for the same harbor ; the voyage is 
one from first to last whatever the storms and 
calms and shifting courses. Human nature will 
not deny itself in its highest faculty, nor suffer it- 
self to be ''killed in the eye," as Milton phrases 
it, for it is by the eye that it lives. 

There is, however, no doubt as to the reality of 
the transition. It is the greatest since the Refor- 
mation, even if it is not of deeper significance. 
That was a reform of transient errors and abuses ; 
this is a discovery of permanent principles. The 
signs of it are too apparent to be overlooked or 
disregarded. They are variously interpreted — by 
some to portend disaster and ruin ; by others as the 
breaking in of new light upon the world ; by none 
without deepest interest and that solicitude which 
great movements always awaken even when be- 
neficent. Religion loves the things of religion. 
Many an error has been kept alive because it is 

(75) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



enshrined in holy and tender associations ; and 
thus it becomes in a way useful and does the 
work of truth itself. There are creeds, ancient 
and historic, which no one pretends wholly to be- 
lieve and most men wholly deny, but which are 
so bound up with eternal truths, and are still so 
useful and so dear because they have been so 
sanctified by human love, that one cannot see 
them tottering to their fall without grief and fear 
lest nothing equally strong and sacred take their 
place. 

We pass by the signs of this transition ; they 
are too many to be rehearsed, and their reality 
cannot be disputed. This only needs to be said : 
they have come as a wave, and they have a cer- 
tain likeness or affinity that indicates a common 
source and cause. Some force or forces He back 
of the transition so strong and general as to wear 
a cosmic character, and therefore are both inevi- 
table and beneficent, for what must be is always 
good. 

What are these forces or causes ? They are 
not due to theological changes, as from orthodoxy 
to heresy, but to causes that lie back of theology, 
that are creating a theology of their own. No 
one church or creed is about to win a special 
victory. Indeed one of the beneficent results of 
the transition already visible is that it has sub- 
merged and swept away the petty and unneces- 
sary disputes among the various schools of 



(76) 



Current Religious Thought 



theology, such as Calvinistic and Arminian, 
Orthodox and Unitarian, Prelatical and Puritan. 
Already these differences have ceased to be im- 
portant, claiming the attention only of those who 
have become so habituated to them that they 
cannot let them drop. The transition that is now 
upon us touches every school of thought, and 
favors none except the one that first discerns and 
heeds it ; and the result of that will be a spirit of 
universality which will overcome the differences by 
belittling them. 

What are the immediate causes of the transi- 
tion ? We must state them with categorical 
brevity. Two nearly simultaneous discoveries 
soon after the middle of the last century swept 
away the foundations of the greater part of the 
historic creeds. I refer to the evolutionary con- 
ception of the origin of man and the higher criti- 
cism of the Scriptures. The first revolutionized 
thought as to the creation of man and left no 
room for the doctrine of a fall, and of sin and 
redemption and final destiny as connected with 
it. The higher criticism had a like effect upon 
the doctrine of inspiration. Under the new read- 
ing the Bible seemed to lose both authenticity 
and authority. Under the same influences the ec- 
clesiastical assumptions that underlie the churches 
and turn them into warrinof sects are undermined. 
Each is found to rest on misread Scripture. These 
two discoveries slowly but surely crept into the 



{77) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

minds of the people, and with two-fold effect ; a 
part denied both and clung to the old forms of 
belief; the other and larger part has yielded to 
the overwhelming evidence, but cannot reconcile 
the new truth with the old doctrines. The result 
is confusion of thought and the natural conse- 
quent of inaction. The age has lost one form of 
thought ; it has not yet gained the new and better 
form that awaits it. The condition is well de- 
scribed by Matthew Arnold : 

** Wandering between two worlds ; one dead, 
The other powerless to be born." 

No mistake could be greater than to suppose this 
condition is due to giving up old forms of belief 
except the mistake of thinking that it can be bet- 
tered by a return to the lapsed forms. They 
were outgrown, and the new age cannot again 
clothe itself in them. It does not signify that 
large numbers and bodies of earnest believers 
and even institutions cling to the old with pas- 
sionate fervor ; they but bide the time when the 
doubt and confusion will overtake them and draw 
them into the general current of thought that 
marks the age. In the main, each age or gener- 
ation thinks the same ; else it could not support its 
own life. Some great governing force moves and 
guides it. At last all yield to it and share to- 
gether in the good and ill of the transition. 
Those who stand out against it come to naught. 
These two discoveries not only enlarged the 

(78) 



Current Religious Thought 



field of knowledge but changed the whole habit 
of thought. For the first time the law of cause 
and effect came into full use in the religious 
world, and insisted on the scientific method. 
Whatever is now claimed in religion must be rea- 
sonable. Heretofore the inspired dictum of Scrip- 
ture and ecclesiastical authority had shut out this 
prime law of thought. Religion had clustered 
about these two points. To trust the literal word 
of Scripture, to obey the Church and hold to the 
creed, seemed to cover the whole duty of man. 
To forsake these sacred strongholds and enter 
the new world of knowledge, where all things are 
settled by appeal to facts, costs a struggle from 
which many turn away as too severe and too peril- 
ous to be undertaken. Nothing has so tended to 
create confusion in belief as insistence on this 
point. It is a fatal touchstone when applied to a 
very large part of what was believed a century 
ago. But as it destroys it will also build, and 
this tendency is slowly becoming one of the cur- 
rents of religious thought. 

What are the signs of it ? Our answer must 
be in a few words. There is getting to be a 
Bible that can be believed because it can be 
explained. Legend and myth and poetry and 
symbolism and history and prophecy are shown 
to be what they are. The current of thought 
is moving fast in this direction. If one kind of 
faith is lost, a better faith is gained. 

(79) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

— ^^ III millBB mi l I I ■ IIBIMBMI I ^Mg J^^MBJ^M IM 1 111 I I II ■ II ■ ■■ ■ 1 1 mWJ4J^J.«J-l II », < P J ■ — »^»— .m , M 

There is a new conception of the universe as 
under one law, and a real belief that Tennyson 
is right in asserting that there is 

*' One far off divine event 

To which the whole creation moves." 

Thus dualism, the plague of theology and no less 
of faith, is passing avv^ay, and it is becoming pos- 
sible to hold a consistent belief in the fatherhood 
of God and the sonship of m.an. 

It is also becoming easy to see Jesus as the 
human revelation of God. As this fact is reheved 
of the tritheistic cast that has for ages enveloped 
it, it becom.es a true light disclosing a great body 
of correlated truths that are the very soul and 
life of human society, and that furnish the only 
revelation of destiny which thought can accept or 
faith can hope for. Already these new currents 
of thought have revealed a new sense of humanity 
that betokens a new heaven and a new earth, 
with here and there a realization of it. Political 
science would name it as democracy. Literature 
recognizes it as humanity — a new feehng of man 
for man — and as the philosophy of life. When 
the churches confess it to be religio7i and bring 
themselves into accord with it down to the full 
details of belief and worship and fellowship — that 
is, when the fatherhood of God is treated as 
something real and as revealed in humanity as 
furnishing its law and method — a very consider- 
able measure of the present confusion of thought 

(8c) 



Current Religious Thought 

will pass away and faith be restored to its su- 
premacy over life. 

It is proper to indicate something of the litera- 
ture that bears on the points I have touched. 
It has already become voluminous and covers a 
field reachino- from recondite studies to those of 
handbook simplicity. I will name four groups. 

1. Books which yield a new conception of the 
universe as it is revealed by science. 

The great authors are the discoverers them- 
selves : Darwin, Wallace, Huxley, and a group 
of immediate successors whose writings are even 
more correct and more popular. Chief among 
these is Le Conte, of the University of California, 
whose works are all that the ordinary reader re- 
quires to give him a clear understanding of the 
laws and methods of evolution in the physical 
world. 

2. Books which yield a new conception of man 
as related to nature. 

Chief among works on this point is Drummond's 
The Ascent of Man, a book not yet nor soon to be 
displaced by possibly more accurate treatises on 
the same subject. Drummond is near enough 
the truth for the ordinary reader, and he has what 
few writers on science have — the ability to see into 
the nature of things and to uncover the relation 
of one thing to another. Hence, he immediately 
carried evolution not only into ethics but into the 
very sanctities of religion. In his first book, 

6i (8i) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

Natural Law in tJie Spiritual World, he may have 
pressed analog}^ too far, and in defence of doc- 
trines which are unreal ; but The Ascent of Man 
is not open to such criticism. 

Of the same general character are the later 
writings of the lamented John Fiske : The Idea 
of God, The Destiny of Ma7i, Through Nature 
to God. But these brief treatises have great value 
as findinor in evolution fresh revelations of God 
and of immortality that have the force of demon- 
stration. 

3. Books which treat of the higher criticism, or 
the new interpretation of the Bible. 

The clearest and most accessible books, and 
also the most reliable, sustained as they are by 
agreement with the most eminent scholars abroad 
and at home, are those of Dr. Lyman Abbott, of 
The Outlook, Dr. Washington Gladden, Pro- 
fessor George Adam Smith, of Glasgow, and Dr. 
Robert Horton, of London. I name these among 
many of great value because of their seriousness, 
their clearness, and their excellence as literature. 
There should be added to these the recently pub- 
lished volume of Harnack, What is Christia7iity ? 
the most significant and important contribution to 
religious thought in the last decade. 

4. Books which indicate the present status and 
tendency of religious thought. 

On the same principle of selection as just 
stated, I name Dr. George A. Gordon's The 

(82) 



Current Religious Thought 



Christ of Today and The N'ew Epoch for Faith. 
The latter is a course of lectures given in the 
winter of 1901 before the Lowell Institute in 
Boston, and has for its specific purpose an inter- 
pretation of the religious conditions and trend of 
thought today. Nothing of greater value has 
been said upon the relation of evolution and the 
higher criticism to faith, or so clearly points out 
the direction in which the currents of religious 
thought are flowing. It is needless to say that 
they point where all high thought, all true science, 
all pure religion point ; namely, to the redemption 
of the world out of its lower conditions of evil, 
and to the moral supremacy of man. 

Along with these books may be placed, as of 
the same general tenor, the works of Professor 
Peabody, of Harvard University, President 
George Harris, of Amherst College, and Presi- 
dent William DeWitt Hyde, of Bowdoin College, 
— each not only showing the direction of the cur- 
rent but helping to swell its volume. 



tA y. ^7^^t^^-^^>^^^^ 



:33) 



THE FUNCTION of 
DOGMA: A Discussion 

by WILLIAM DE WITT HYDE 



(85) 



THE FUNCTION of 
DOGMA: A Discussion 

by WILLIAM DE WITT HYDE 



When in 1885 William De Witt Hyde be- 
came president of Bowdoin College, he had the 
distinction of being the youngest college presi- 
dent in America. He was but 26 years old. He 
had been graduated from Harvard at 21, later re- 
ceiving the degree of D.D. from the same college 
and LL.D. from Syracuse. Dr. Hyde was born in 
Massachusetts ; his early training was received in 
its public schools and at Phillips Exeter Acad- 
emy ; and he is by many ties identified with New 
England. He is a Congregationalist. His aca- 
demic labors in the old halls at Brunswick, Me., 
that sheltered Longfellow and Hawthorne, con- 
sume the greater part of his time ; but he is a con- 
stant contributor to the magazines on educational 
and religious subjects. His longer publications 
include Practical Ethics, Social Theology, Prac- 
tical Idealism, GocT s Education of Man ^\\(\ The 
Art of Optimism. 

It is doubtless occasion for congratulation that 
all the systems of theology constructed pre- 
vious to the general acceptance of the doctrine of 
evolution, and the universal diffusion of the results 
of historical and biblical criticism, have ''had their 
day and ceased to be." Evolution and criticism 
have given us a larger world, and the system of 
thought that is to express this enlarged world 
must be vastly more complex and capacious than 
any of the systems that went before. System of 

(S7) 



The Booklovers Reading Clu 



some sort, however, we must have, if practical 
Hfe is to be wisely directed and pure emotion is 
to be permanently sustained. If there is a God ; 
if there has been a revelation of his will in history 
and of his nature in humanity ; if there is a per- 
son worthy to be called his Son, and a Spirit 
adequate to represent him in the world today ; 
if man, by nature the heir of the animal, is in 
spirit capable of becoming the child of God ; if 
there are processes by which man can rise from 
the natural to the spiritual state, and gain assur- 
ance of divine favor — then it must be possible to 
render some intellio^ible account of these facts 
and processes, and to set forth these truths in 
rational relation and systematic form. 

This doctrinal duty our churches are failing to 
fulfil today. There is no accepted body of doc- 
trine, clear-cut, well reasoned, consistently and 
comprehensively thought out, which you can count 
upon hearing when you enter a Christian church. 
In an informal discussion at a club, where men of 
widely different views were expressing themselves 
with great freedom, a mill agent, a man of unusual 
keenness and intelligence, a member of a Con- 
gregational church, described what is actually 
given out in many of our churches as " debris float- 
ing in dishwater." 

The fault is not exclusively or chiefly with the 
ministers. Our mode of selecting ministers, 
while it tests a man's rhetoric and elocution, and 



(88) 



Current Religious Thought 

whether he has a taking way with the young 
people, gives Httle or no means of ascertaining 
whether he has a reasoned and organic body of 
truth to communicate or not. Furthermore, we 
have no recognized centres or agencies through 
which such a positive body of doctrine is being 
effectively disseminated. There are a few indi- 
vidual writers here and there who give some evi- 
dence that they have thought things through to a 
conclusion ; but they are too much engrossed 
with practical cares to give more than glimpses 
of their doctrine to the public. There are colleges 
and seminaries which teach philosophy and theol- 
ogy ; but a theological professor of large experi- 
ence remarked recently that he knew of only two 
colleges which give their students a point of view 
which has any significance for theology ; and the 
professors of theology are too new in their places, 
or have too few pupils under them, to have made 
upon the churches as a whole the impression of a 
''school," with characteristic and positive convic- 
tions. There are excellent publications which 
contain excellent articles ; but, since the unfortu- 
nate discontinuance of The Andover Review^ we 
have not had a publication devoted to fundamental 
theological problems which can be counted on to 
give a definite, consistent, consecutive presenta- 
tion of a positive point of view. Whether the 
doctrines advocated in that Review were sound or 
unsound, helpful or harmful, is a matter on which 

(S9) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



there is honest difference of opinion and which 
it is not necessary to discuss. It did give an able 
presentation of certain views, and it did provoke 
able criticism of those views, and both the state- 
ment and the criticism were of great service to 
the development of thoughtfulness on these great 
themes. 

The fashion nowadays to decry and depreciate 
dogma is the most silly and foolish of the many 
fads of the hour. If we give way to it we shall 
soon or late be compelled to substitute second- 
hand ecclesiastical hearsay, in fantastic garb and 
unctuous intonation, for personal insight into the 
laws and personal possession of the motives of 
wise and noble living. 

Dogma is to religion what astronomy is to the 
stars, what botany is to flowers. We do not con- 
sider it sufficient simply to gaze at the stars and 
smell the sweet odor of the flowers. The astron- 
omer breaks up the starlight with his lenses and 
gives us a doctrine of their motions and their 
chemical constitution, which is a very different 
thing from what the plain man gets by simple 
star-gazing. It is the science of astronomy. The 
botanist cruelly pulls the lovely flower to pieces 
and gives you in place of the beautiful and fra- 
grant whole a name and a place in a system of 
classification. It is the science of botany. And 
yet there are men who have no quarrel with either 
astronomer or botanist, who nevertheless raise a 



(90) 



Current Religious Thought 

great hue and cry the moment you begin to ana- 
lyze God's attributes and attitude toward man, 
and to break up man into his elemental passions 
and pull apart the springs of motive in his soul. 
They complain that in place of the living God 
and breathing man you are giving them mere 
dead dogmas and inanimate abstractions. To be 
sure, you are. You are doing for God and man 
precisely what the astronomer does for the stars, 
precisely what the botanist does for the flower. 
You are aiming to be scientific ; you are apply- 
ing the tool of science, which is analysis, to the 
revelation of God and to the soul of man. It 
may be a cold, cruel thing to do. It may be that 
the product is not so beautiful as is the living 
whole with which we start. But it is just as nec- 
essary and just as useful in the one case as in the 
other. If any man in this late day wishes to go 
up and down the earth decrying science, he is 
welcome to the task, though he will get scant 
hearing for his pains. Let him not, however, pose 
as the friend and advocate of science in every 
other department of knowledge, and then when 
it comes to the subject of man in his relation to 
God decry the scientific method of logical anal- 
ysis, and dogma, which is its inevitable product. 
You can get star-gazing without spectrum anal- 
ysis. You can get the bloom and fragrance of 
the rose without a compound microscope. You 
can get sweet, sentimental experiences of piety 

(91) 



The Booklovers Reading Clus 



without logic and dogma. In all other depart- 
ments, however, the world has agreed that the 
shallow, sentimiental first impression is not enough. 
If we are to save religion from the intellectual 
contempt into which it is fast falling under the in- 
fluence of this superficial sentimentalism, v/e must 
subject man in his relation to God to a rigorous 
analysis ; we must throw out one by one upon 
the screen of logic the component elements of 
the divine nature ; we must lay side by side upon 
the table the sepals and petals and stamens and 
pistils of man's dissected soul. 

*'Ah!" my unscientific, sentimental friend ob- 
jects, '' you forget what wretched, false, grotesque 
work men have made of it when they have tried 
to subject the idea of God to logical analysis and 
draw up man's nature and destiny in terms of 
dogma." No, I do not forget. There has been 
a great deal of false and pernicious dogma in the 
Vv^orld, I must admit. But theology is no excep- 
tion. The Ptolemaic astronomy taught many 
erroneous notions. Shall we, therefore, decry 
astronomy as a whole and revert to simple star- 
gazing ? The Linnaean system of botanical classi- 
fication was arbitrary, fantastic and misleading. 
Shall we, therefore, assume in advance that Gray 
and Goodale have nothing to tell us which it is 
worth our while to hear ? Augustine and Calvin 
and Edwards doubtless made mistakes. But does 
it follow that there is nothing for us to do today 



Current Religious Thought 

but settle down in self-complacent ignorance and 
trust that man is on the whole a very good being, 
or if he isn't, a good God will bring him out all 
right in the sweet by and by? The man that 
takes this indolent attitude becomes thereby in- 
tellectually side-tracked, and erelong will find 
that the train of earnest thinking has moved on 
and left him standing generations behind the 
times. 

If one is ever tempted to indulge in this super- 
ficial depreciation of dogma, let him remember 
that therein he is parting with his intellectual 
birthright, which is a definite, scientific grasp of 
the principles of the spiritual life ; let him re- 
member that for every such idle word of blas- 
phemy against the holy name of science he shall 
give account at the bar of outraged reason for 
what comes perilously near to being the one un- 
pardonable intellectual sin. 

It does not follow that dogma is to be preached, 
any more than it does that it would be wise for 
an astronomer to offer his diagrams and formulae 
to a visitor to his observatory as a substitute for 
the stars the visitor comes to see ; or that a 
botanist should give his guest a bouquet of tech- 
nical names in place of flowers to look upon and 
smell. The preacher should know dogma as the 
scientist knows his formulae and nomenclature. 
He should be able to state in dogmatic terms 
what precise changes from lower to higher states 

(93) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



of thought and feeling and voHtion his sermon is 
calculated to produce. 

The work of intellectual destruction has gone 
far enough. The immediate work before us now 
is not destructive, but constructive. We no 
longer need the inspector to condemn, but the 
architect to plan. In view of the havoc which 
evolutionary and critical conceptions have wrought 
in the traditional beliefs, it is time to weld together 
the truths we have saved from the wreck of the 
ancient systems and the truths that have been 
brought to us on the flood of these scientific and 
historical studies, into a definite, coherent, rea- 
soned and reasonable body of doctrine, which 
will give the intelligible plan of life and authori- 
tative guide to conduct that, in the complexity of 
modern life, is more imperatively demanded to- 
day than it ever was before. 




Note — The foregoing article is a selection from the introduction 
to President Hyde's recent book, God' s Education of Man. In 
response to our invitation to contribute a special paper to this 
handbook, Dr. Hyde suggested that we reprint a portion of his 
introductory chapter. We were enabled to do so through the 
courtesy of the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 



(94) 



The Present Emphasis in 

Religious Thought: A Lecture 
by AMORY H. BRADFORD 



(95) 



The Present Emphasis in 

Religious Thought: A Lecture 
by AMORY H. BRADFORD 



Dr. Amory Howe Bradford was ordained to 
the Congregational ministry and settled over 
the First Congregational Church at Montclair, 
N. J., in 1870. He is a graduate of Hamil- 
ton College and Andover Theological Seminary. 
He also pursued post-graduate studies at the 
University of Oxford in England. His first im- 
portant publication was Spirit and Life. Since 
then he has published many books, among the 
best known of which are The Pilgrim in Old 
England^ The Growing Revelation, Heredity and 
Christian Problems y The Art of Living Alone , 
The Age of Faith. For about ten years he was 
on the staff of The Outlook. He was also editor 
of Christian Thought. He has been South worth 
lecturer at Andover Theological Seminary, presi^ 
dent of The American Institute of Christian 
Philosophy, was a member of the deputation sent 
by the American Board to Japan to inspect its 
missions in 1895, and was moderator of the 
National Council of Congregational Churches in 
1901. He is still the pastor of the church at 
Montclair. 

Religious thought is clearly in a process of 
transition. What has been called the sci- 
ence of theology is fast becoming a philosophy of 
religion. Theology has usually been written from 
a partial point of view. One class of traditions 
and one phase of experience have been studied 
with little regard to their relations to other equally 

(97) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

well-attested traditions and experiences. Theo- 
logians have not surveyed the whole field of 
inquiry, but have sought rather to justify certain 
presuppositions. They have begun by accepting 
the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, and have en- 
deavored to construct theological systems, using 
only such material as came to them through those 
channels. Many of the noblest treatises ever 
written belong to this class. They have been pro- 
found but they have not been scientific. Isolated 
facts and experiences can never be sufficient ma- 
terial for an enduring theology. Relations must 
be considered as well as revelations. Theology 
has been written from the point of view of the 
Christian Scriptures and the Christian conscious- 
ness. For illustration I need only refer to Cal- 
vin's Institutes, Hodge's Systematic Theology, the 
method adopted by the great teachers of New 
England and of Old England, of Germany and 
Switzerland. The systemiS of the past were not 
reared on a world-wide induction of facts. 
Modern thinkers approach the ideas of God and 
of the moral order through a study of the universe, 
and of the universal religious feeling however and 
wherever manifested, and from that study seek to 
reach conclusions which all classes of people in all 
tim^es will recognize as true. We are in the midst 
of what may be called the deprovincializing of 
religious thought. The process is by no means 
complete. The discoveries of science, the study 

(98) 



Current Religious Thought 

of comparative religions and the larger acquaint- 
ance of students with the thought and life of their 
fellowmen have done their part in making the 
beginnings of a broader theology. Hints of its 
nature are to be seen in such works as Edward 
Caird's Evolutioji of Religion, Andrew M. Fair- 
bairn's The Place of Christ iji Modern Theol- 
ogy, George Matheson's Distinctive Messages of 
the Old Religions, Elisha Mulford's Republic of 
God, A. V. G. Allen's Continuity of Christian 
Thought, Newman Smyth's Old Faiths in New 
Lights y T. T. Hunger's Freedom of Faith, 
Auguste Sabatier's OtUlines of a Philosophy of 
Religion^ Augustus H. Strong's Ethical Monism, 
Samuel Harris' God the Creator and Lord of All, 
William Newton Clarke's Outline of Christian 
Theology, and H. Churchill King's Reconstruc- 
tion in Theology. 

This tendency is also visible in the psychologi- 
cal study of the religious feeling, a department of 
inquiry which has been created within the last de- 
cade. The old method was to study the Bible and 
the Christian ; the new method is to study the 
universe and humanity. This tendency is best 
seen in various papers by President G. Stanley 
Hall, in Starbuck's Psychology of Religion, Coe's 
The Spiritual Life, and Granger's The Soid of 
a Christian. As a result of such influences, the- 
ology in the sense in which the word was formerly 
used is becoming a philosophy of religion. 

L.oIC. (99) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

The next great change in theological thinking 
has been caused by the well-nigh universal accept- 
ance of the doctrine of evolution. There are, no 
doubt, a few who still think that evolution is a 
foe to be fought rather than a friend to be wel- 
comed. Such persons we must leave to their 
convictions, for they have little company besides. 
At first evolution was supposed to have to do 
with the body and not with the spirit, with the 
physical but not with the psychical nature. In- 
vestigation has more clearly revealed the sphere 
of its operation until now it is truly defined, in a 
well-known phrase, as "the cosmic process." 
Evolution is the method by which the universe 
has been developed and is still developing. Its 
working is revealed in the history of humanity 
no less than in the procession of animal life. The 
acceptance of this theory has already vitally 
affected theological thinking, and may do so still 
more in the future. Among the best books on 
the general subject are TJie Destiny of Man, 
The Idea of God, and Through Natiwe to 
God, by John Fiske ; TJie Evolution of Christian- 
ity, by Lyman Abbott ; TJie Ascent of Man, by 
Henry Drummond ; and The Asceiit through 
Christ, by Griffith-Jones. 

During the last two decades there has been 
a recurrence to a belief in the immanence of 
God. That recurrence is chiefiy due to evolu- 
tionary teaching. When we have said that the 

(lOO) 



Current Religious Thought 

universe is the result of a process of evolution, 
the inquiry has arisen: ''Is God within this 
process or is he outside of it ? If he is out- 
side, then there is no universe ; if he is 
within it, is he identified with it? Or, in some 
way, does he transcend it?" The consensus of 
opinion is that he is within it but not identified 
with it. Identification would be more than mon- 
ism — it would be pantheism. How can he be 
within and yet the creator? Is matter also 
eternal ? Then is there not another God ? And 
are we not landed in dualism ? The point of 
greatest difficulty is here faced. If God is the 
substance in which all things inhere, then what 
becomes of his transcendence ? Does not our 
monistic philosophy lead to pantheism ? The 
answer is simple. Transcendence is not a ques- 
tion of space, but of spirit. As Dr. A. H. Strong 
has put it — "Transcendence is not necessarily 
outsideness in space, but inexhaustibleness of 
resources within." The spirit of man is within 
his body and yet it transcends the body. God is 
the spirit who pervades the universe, and yet he 
transcends the universe. The immanence of 
God does not limit his transcendence. This idea 
of the divine indwelling is surely and swiftly 
modifying theological thinking. Those who do 
not define distinctly seem to be entangled in the 
meshes of pantheism, but this teaching is not 
pantheistic. It is rather the doctrine of the 

(lOl) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



divine omnipresence with a background of 
science. The best treatment of this subject that 
I know is to be found in God the Creator and 
Lord of All, by Harris ; Strong's Ethical Monism, 
and Divine Im^nane^ice, by IlHngworth. 

It follows that the world is not an evil world 
since it is pervaded by God ; that humanity is not 
all depraved and lost since God is now and al- 
ways has been working within it for the accom- 
plishment of his purposes of benefit. The 
brotherhood of man is seen to have a philosophi- 
cal basis which was never discerned in the older 
teaching. The solidarity of the race is not only 
the dream of poets, but the solid foundation upon 
which a noble fabric of civilization is slowly rising. 
A class of teachers, of whom perhaps Ernst 
Haeckel is the most prominent, has no place 
for God either within the universe or outside of 
it ; but of these we are not speaking. Most 
of the great scientists have either believed in the 
indwelling deity or have refused either to affirm 
or to deny his presence. Whether evolution be 
true or not, there is no doubt but that it has a 
potent fascination for modern thinkers and that 
this fascination is swiftly making itself felt in all 
systems of theology. 

How does the doctrine of evolution affect the 
person of Christ ? Is he outside the process or 
a product of it ? One class of writers, as we 
should expect, endeavors to account for him by 



(1 02) 



Current Religious Thought 



evolution alone ; but when they are asked to ex- 
plain the presence of the Perfect Man at a time 
when the evolutionary process was far from its 
culmination, they give us no satisfaction. It is 
enough to say here that this subject has not yet 
received much attention. On no theory of evo- 
lution which has not classified Jesus with merely 
great men has his unique power been explained. 
That he is of the same nature as all men is 
granted, but that does not solve the difficulty. It 
has been finely said by a theologian distinguished 
for his conservatism, that ''the difference between 
man and God is not one of nature but of miles." 
Surely, then, the difference between the ordinary 
man and the Typical Man is not one of nature 
but of distance. Theologians have not yet suc- 
ceeded in accounting for his presence in history 
by regarding him as a product of evolution. I 
have discussed this question more at length in my 
book entitled Heredity and Clunstian Problems. 
Bushnell's great chapter in Nature and the Su- 
pernatural, on the ''Person of Christ," also bears 
on this subject. 

If evolution is an established law, what becomes 
of sin and moral obligation ? If the race is in 
the midst of a process over which individuals have 
no control, are they not to be regarded as simply 
imperfect, and not accountable for failure to reach 
ideal standards ? Is not evolution the substitu- 
tion of fatalism for responsibility ? To those who 



(103) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



do not know the way in which evolutionary 
thought affects theology these inquiries seem to 
be difficult of answer ; but evolution regards 
human beings as possessing will, and therefore 
free, and consequently accountable. Failure to 
use the measure of development which has been 
achieved is sin. Granting that men have risen 
from animals, they are now spirits, although 
spirits with an entail of animalism. For a spirit- 
ual being in any stage of his development to 
choose things which belong to the animal rather 
than to the spirit is sin. There is here a clear 
recognition of moral obligation. Evolution does 
nothing to diminish the idea of sin and responsi- 
bility, although, of course, the teachings of many 
evolutionists do. If there is in modern life a 
tendency to make light of the enormity of wrong- 
doing, it is because of the growth of secularism 
rather than because of the influence of evolution. 
The doctrine of evolution has strengthened the 
evidence for the immortality of the soul. Physi- 
cal evolution has culminated in man. Hence- 
forward development must be along spiritual 
lines. Its goal is the perfection of the human 
spirit. That process can be completed in no 
brief period of threescore and ten years. It may 
require unnumbered ages. In other words, evo- 
lution requires the immortality of the soul. This 
is the prevailing belief among theistic evolution- 
ists. Thus evolution has aided the faith of many 

(104) 



Current Religious Though r 

who had begun to imagine that it was destructive 
of the finest aspirations and ideals of humanity. 
This truth is luminously treated in Fiske's Destmy 
of Mail and Life Everlastiiig, and in Gor- 
don's l77Z7nortality and the New Theodicy. See 
also Professor William James' IngersoU lecture 
on Hu77tan Iim7i07^tality. 

The time has long since passed for any to in- 
sist that evolution is not the dominant note in 
modern thought. It is no longer presumption to 
affirm that nearly if not quite all scholarly 
thinkers accept as a law what for a time was re- 
garded as only an hypothesis. At first it was sup- 
posed that evolution would prove to be a foe of 
the Christian faith. It is now regarded as one of 
its strongest allies. That it modifies many doc- 
trines must be confessed ; but it weakens none 
which ought to endure. It emphasizes the im- 
manence of God as the fulness of life within the 
universe rather than as a Being existing some- 
where outside of it ; it shows that sin is a reality, 
that salvation is a necessity, that what philoso- 
phers call ''the cosmic process" is moving in the 
interests of love toward a goal of blessing ; and 
it proves that the doctrine of immortality has 
beneath it the imperative demand of science and 
reason, as well as the universal human longing. 

Our survey of the field of theology reveals an- 
other fact too evident to require special notice and 
yet too significant to be passed by. Almost 

(105) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



everywhere God is now interpreted in terms of 
fatherhood. Formerly the governing idea was 
sovereignty. With a few it is so still. In the 
newer thinking sovereignty is not ignored, but we 
see that the sovereign is the Father and the Father 
the sovereign. While the reign of law is too 
evident and universal to be ignored, it is main- 
tained that lav\^ in every sense is but the ex- 
pression of the will and the nature of the Father 
Almighty. This tendency to interpret God by 
his fatherhood is not merely the teaching of the 
schools ; it appears still more distinctly when we 
leave professional theologians and com^e to the 
masses of the people. They will believe nothing 
vvhich contradicts their moral sense. They brush 
aside as untrue everything which is at enmity with 
love. With them intuition is more authoritative 
than tradition. The faith of the common people 
may be condensed into two phrases, God is the 
Father and God is Love ; and the common people 
in their better moments are usually right. This 
emphasis on fatherhood contains no tendency to 
limit his infinity or to define him in merely 
anthropomorphic terms. The old way was to 
exalt an earthly ruler to infinity and say, '' Behold 
your God ! " The modern way is to take the most 
elemental of human relations and, sublimating it, 
to say, *' In fatherhood you will find the true idea of 
deity." Is God too great for our limited language ? 
All language is inadequate. Names are nothing. 



(106) 



Current Religious Thought 



What is meant is this : the cosmic process is to 
be interpreted in terms of fatherhood ; and what is 
called '' the nature of things " is but the manifesta- 
tion of omnipotent love. I have used this principle 
in my Age of Faith to interpret God, history and 
human destiny. See also the sermons of Henry 
Ward Beecher and Phillips Brooks. This change 
of emphasis from sovereignty to fatherhood has 
wrought an equal change in other doctrines. 

I take two illustrations. A century ago it 
w^as customary, when speaking of the work of 
salvation, to emphasize what it was imagined 
needed to be done in order that man might 
be forgiven consistently either with the nature 
of God or with moral law. The atonement v/as 
either the means by which the law was suitably 
honored, or the nature of God sufficiently satis- 
fied. The modern view regards the atone- 
ment as the expression, within the limits of time 
and humanity, of what God always has been do- 
ing and always must do for the salvation of his 
children. It is thus a part of the incarnation. It 
is not mere theatrical display but a glorious 
revelation of the divine nature and character. 
Because God is Father he is under an obligation 
to himself to seek to bring all his children to 
himself; and because he is omnipotent he can- 
not be forever defeated. The old doctrine rep- 
resented a third party as doing something by 
which man might consistently be forgiven. The 



(107) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

modern doctrine, which is not new, teaches that 
God is revealed in the terms of humanity^ as 
eternally forgiving, and that the work of Christ 
was the manifestation of the essential nature of 
the Father. The most significant discussion of this 
subject that I know is in a series of essays entitled 
The Atoneine7it m Modern Religious Thought, 
published by James Clark and Company, London. 
The writers are men of eminence, of many lands 
and various schools of thought. The Gospel of 
the Atoiiemeut, by Archdeacon Wilson, is also to 
be commended. 

Probably the most revolutionary result of this 
change of emphasis from sovereignty^ to father- 
hood is in the sphere of eschatolog}'. Almost 
everywhere the doctrine of rewards and penalties 
is expressed very differently from what it was 
formerly. When the old Avine skins of expression 
are still used, they are filled with a new wine of 
doctrine. Few would state their belief in punish- 
ment in the future life in such language as was 
once used. Retribution as a necessary, uni- 
versal, and eternal laiv is even more firmly estab- 
lished than a century ago ; but the teaching of 
everlasting conscious punishment for sins com- 
mitted on this earth alone is seldom heard in the 
pulpits of any denomination in any part of the 
world. That suffering inevitably follows wrong- 
doing no sane man can deny; and that it will last 
as long as sin continues is a necessary inference. 

(loSj 



Current Religious Thought 

All the discoveries of science and all the teach- 
ings of experience in one voice affirm that wrong- 
doing and suffering are bound together inextric- 
ably and forever. So long as the sinner persists 
in violating the moral law he must suffer ; love 
requires that ; but to teach that a human being, 
by the simple act of death, is at once and forever 
beyond the possibility of a moral change, is to 
teach that beyond the grave there is no sphere of 
moral freedom and that death is the destruction 
of personality. This is increasingly evident to 
thoughtful students. The masses, however, 
simply jump to the conclusion that it is a contra- 
diction to speak of the good Father as allowing 
any of his children to suffer infinite and unend- 
ing punishment for wrongs committed in the 
childhood of their existence. See Gordon's New 
Epoch for Faith, McConnell's The Evolution of 
Immortality, Whiton's Is Eternal Punishme7it 
Endless? and Emerson's essay on "Compensa- 
tion." Van Dyke's Gospel for a World of Sin 2ir\d 
his Gospel for ait Age of Doubt also touch on this 
subject and are of great value as illustrating the 
general trend of religious thought. 

More than ever men are insisting that all doc- 
trine shall be brought to the test of life. This, if 
I understand it, is the chief contribution of Ritsch- 
lianism to our time. Ritschl taught that truth is 
verified only as it proves its worth. A doctrine 
of God is true in so far as it inspires reverence 

(109) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

and obedience ; a doctrine of the atonement is 
true in so far as it persuades men to sacrifice 
themselves for their fellowmen in the spirit of 
Christ ; the doctrine of sin which most accurately 
corresponds with the witness of the moral sense 
and the human experience is most trustworthy ; 
and no teaching concerning retribution can be 
accepted for a moment which, when the heart is 
true to itself, produces moral revulsion. In other 
times it was enough simply to appeal to the Word 
as our authority ; we now appreciate that the 
Word is itself the record of human experience, 
and can be interpreted only by experience. This 
is finely illustrated and amplified in The Evidence 
of Christiaii Experience, by the late Professor L. 
F. Stearns. That which is accepted as the result 
only of argument may be doubted after it is 
proved, but truth certified by experience is ac- 
cepted and reverenced as final. Therefore it may 
be affirmed that faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and 
Savior is more general and vital than ever be- 
fore because the salvation which he achieves is 
seen to be ethical, practical, and essential to the 
completeness and glory of human life on the 
earth. Theology is making more rather than less 
of Christ. For a knowledge of Ritschlianism, see 
Justification and Reconciliation, by Ritschl ; The 
Communiofi of the Chins tian with God, by Her- 
mann; The Ritschlian Theology, by Professor Orr; 
and An Exami?iation of Ritschlianism, by Garvie. 

(no) 



Current Religious Thought 

Any consideration of modern religious thought 
which failed to recognize the widespread and 
eager interest in the study of the Hebrew and 
Christian Scriptures would be altogether inade- 
quate. The critical movement is often misunder- 
stood. It is not destructive in its tendency. It 
is an effort to reach absolute reality in everything. 
When applied to the Bible it seeks to destroy 
nothing which does not obscure the truth. It 
asks what the Bible is, who its authors were, what 
the circumstances were in which it was written, 
whether in any way it has been added to or sub- 
tracted from. That it is destructive of many tradi- 
tions there can be no doubt, but it is equally clear 
that its influence in the end will make it possible 
for the truth to shine with a clearer lustre. It is 
difficult to select books which best represent and 
expound the results of the critical study of the 
Bible. Probably none are more lucid and more 
popular than Biblical Study, by Professor C. A. 
Briggs ; What Is the Bible? by Professor G. T. 
Ladd ; Who Wrote the Bible f by Dr. Washing- 
ton Gladden ; The Life and Literature of the 
Ancient Hebrews, by Dr. Lyman Abbott ; The 
Prophets of Israel and The Old Testament in the 
Jewish Church, by Professor Robertson Smith ; 
and last, but not least. Modern Criticism and the 
Preaching of the Old Testameiit, by George Adam 
Smith. On the conservative side. The Old Testa- 
ment under Fire, by Dr. A. J. F. Behrends, and 

(III) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

The Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch, by Pro- 
fessor W. H. Green, of Princeton, are among 
those most worthy of commendation. 

The Christian theory of the state and of society 
is a subject that is attracting a great deal of atten- 
tion among the clergy and the laity. We are often 
and insistently told that the questions of our time 
are social questions. The literature on this sub- 
ject is very extensive and very able. Much of the 
best thinking along these lines is to be found in 
the annual reports and bulletins of the various 
social settlements, Hke Toynbee Hall, Mansfield 
House, and Browning Hall in London ; Hull 
House and The Commons in Chicago ; the Uni- 
versity Settlement in New York, and VVhittier 
House in Jersey City. 

Among the many books on the subject which 
have recently appeared, the following are a few 
of the most conspicuous and helpful : The World 
as the Subject of Redeinption, by Canon Fremantle ; 
Jesus Christ and the Social Question, by Profes- 
sor Peabody ; Social Aspects of Christianity, by 
Dr. Westcott; and The Social Teachings of Jesus,. 
by Professor Shailer Mathews. 

The best illustrations of religious thought in 
our time are to be found in the many biographies 
of Christian scholars and workers which have 
appeared in recent years. It would be possible 
to give a list of biographies the reading of which 
would result in a liberal education, especially on 



Current Religious Thought 

the subject of religion. I will enumerate but a 
few, every one of which should be read by those 
who would clearly understand the various phases 
of current religious thinking. 

I would place Professor Allen's Life of Jona- 
than Edwards first because Edwards was so dis- 
tinctly a pioneer thinker, one who blazed the way 
along which others in later times have walked, 
without knowing to whom they were indebted. 
Then I would group together the lives of John 
McLeod Campbell, Frederick Denison Maurice, 
and Horace Bushnell because all three were at- 
tracted to the same problems and all on many 
points, especially the atonement, reached sub- 
stantially the same conclusions. Then I would 
link together the lives of Darwin and Huxley be- 
cause they did so much to stimulate thinking along 
religious lines ; and I should want to have read 
at the same time the Life of Henry Drummojid 
as an illustration of the fact that the amplest 
scientific training may coexist with an ardent and 
even evangelistic type of Christianity. The biog- 
raphies of Principal Jowett and Dr. Robert W. 
Dale might also be read at the same time, the 
one as an illustration of the religious attitude of 
the chief scholar of the English universities, and 
the other that of one of the most thoughtful and 
scholarly among modern preachers. For inspira- 
tion to noble activity I have found nothing more 
stimulating than the lives of Thomas Guthrie, 

8i (11^) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

Norman Macleod, David Livingstone, and John G. 
Paton, a quartette of great Scotchmen. I would 
also commend the lives of Charles H. Spurgeon 
and Catherine Booth, though both are too long. 
I have reserved for the last the biographies of the 
four typical Christian thinkers and preachers of 
modern times, Frederick W. Robertson, Dean 
Stanley, Phillips Brooks, and Theodore Parker, 
the first two representing the intellectual aristoc- 
racy of Old England and the others that of New 
England, and all embodying in themselves as 
much of the modern movement in religious 
thought and the modern sensitiveness to life as 
any men who could be named. A study of the 
lives of men like these will convince any who 
need convincing that the race of great and con- 
secrated souls is not dead, that the line of proph- 
ets has not ceased from among men, and that 
so long as the thought and ideals of an age are 
influenced by such leaders and thinkers the times 
are full of hope. 

As I survey the religious world and try to in- 
terpret its voices and tendencies, I notice first 
that what has been called theology is gradually 
giving place to what may more properly be re- 
garded as the philosophy of religion ; that the 
religious problem in its relation to all peoples 
and all phases of faith is being studied with a 
largeness of method and generosity of spirit be- 
fore unknown ; that the kinship of all religions is 

(114) 



Current Religious Thought 



no longer ignored ; that the truth common to all 
is being reverently sought ; that the contributions 
of science are not discarded, and that theology is 
no longer getting its facts solely from the Hebrew- 
people and the Christian experience but from all 
people and all forms of experience in all ages. 

Second. Evolution, as the process in accordance 
with which the universe is developing, has en- 
larged and ennobled the conception of God by 
emphasizing his immanence. It has not yet ac- 
counted for the person of Christ ; it has not di- 
minished, but has rather increased, the sense of 
the enormity of sin ; and it has placed the doctrine 
of immortality on a still firmer foundation by 
showing that the perfection of man, which is the 
goal of ''the cosmic process," requires an im- 
measurable period for its realization. 

Third. Theology is more generally interpreting 
the nature of the Deity by the analogies of the 
family, which are elemental, than by the analogies 
of human government, which are mechanical and 
transitory. It is thus bringing into clear relief 
the sublime truth that the universe itself is sacri- 
ficial and that God, simply because he is Father, 
can no more refrain from giving himself for his 
children than the sun can withhold its light ; that 
while retribution for wrong-doing is consistent 
with his goodness, is required by it, and must 
continue as long as men persist in sinning, the 
thought of infinite suffering for finite transgres- 

(115) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



sion is passing away because inconsistent with 
our innate sense of justice and contradictory to 
every reasonable conception of goodness, of love 
and fatherhood as they are revealed in the teach- 
ings, the example, and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. 

Fourth. The critical movement is constructive 
rather than destructive. 

Fifth, Theology is bringing all speculation to 
the test of worth as witnessed in the human ex- 
perience. Measured by this standard, it finds 
that the stature of Jesus is enlarged and glorified, 
and it becomes easy to believe that he is divine 
whose life and influence for nineteen hundred 
years have been steadily leading humanity toward 
the divine. 

Sixth. Theology has been greatly modified by 
prevalent social teachings. We are enlarging our 
ideals of religion, and recognizing that it has rela- 
tion not only to individuals but to men in their 
corporate relations. 

Finally. The wise way to become accurately 
acquainted with the religious thought of any time 
is to seek to enter into a sympathetic acquaintance 
with the ideals and motives of those who have led 
the thinking of that time ; and this may best be 
done by reading their biographies. 



(ri6) 



THE WIDER OUTLOOK: 

A Talk about Supplementary 

Books by LYMAN P. POWELL 



("7) 



THE WIDER OUTLOOK: 

A Talk about Supplementary 

Books by LYMAN P. POWELL 



Many readers will wish to take a wider outlook 
over the field of religious thought than can be 
had through the three books supplied with the 
course. For the benefit of such students the 
editor has prepared a brief survey of the litera- 
ture upon the subject. 

In this survey the topical arrangement of the 
course as presented on pages 27-37 i^ closely 
followed. The Roman numeral at the head of 
each section refers to the topic of the same num- 
ber in the outline. The reader will note, how- 
ever, that the first topic has been subdivided for 
the special purpose of this survey of some of 
the notable books. 

The author's name alone is used in referring 
to the books. The exact titles will be found in 
the list on page 1 34 which follows this section. 

The heavy Arabic figures in parentheses refer 
to the illustrative selections on pages 135-155. 

In this wider outlook the writer has aimed 
at suggestiveness rather than exhaustiveness. 
Therefore many excellent books have of neces- 
sity been omitted. Nevertheless the list is con- 

(i'9) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

sidered representative of the best thinking on 
current reHgious problems. 

I- / ^ 

[a) RELIGION 

Though, as Dr. Gordon says, assumption, not 
proof, is the ultimate premise of thought, it is worth 
while to consider in the light of current thinking 
such assumptions as religion, God, man, immor- 
tality, for these are still either light centres or 
storm centres in the minds of men. And since 
many theologians differ from Dr. Gordon in the 
order of arrangement, it would perhaps be best 
to follow the order most familiar to the student. 

Campbell (chap, i) treats religion with the 
eloquence of a Chrysostom. That religion alone 
can coordinate the human faculties is his special 
point. (1) 

John Fiske, who has saved 'Taith in spiritual 
realities " for more clergymen than the one re- 
ferred to in T/ie American Monthly Review of 
Reviews, August, 1901, sings the everlasting 
reality of religion in his convincing book (pp. 133- 

Clarke is not of the theologians Harnack had 
in mind when he wrote in the preface of his 
latest book, ''The theologians of every country 
only half discharge their duties if they think it 
enough to treat of the Gospel in the recondite 
language of learning and bury it in scholarly 
folios." Clarke's book is, as Washington Gladden 

(120) 



Current Religious Thought 

says, ** not only good theology — the very best — 
but good literature too." He puts the intuitive 
claim for religion with a force not qualified because 
his style is charming. (2) 

Sabatier, says Dr. Lyman Abbott, has ''the 
modern view of the German, the practicality of 
the Englishman, and the clearness and brilliance 
of style characteristic of the Frenchman." His 
point of view in religion is, as you would expect, 
universal. In the very fact of " the weary weight 
of all this unintelligible world " he sees the genesis 
of religion, and what he sees he tells us in mem- 
orable words. (3) 

A new star is rising in the theological sky. 
Before Professor King lectured at the Harvard 
Summer School, he was known to many. Now 
he is known by all, and his Reconstruction in 
Theology takes its place among the luminous 
books in current theological thinking. 

(b) GOD 

The occasional soul can truly say, ''I, who am 
anxious about many things, am not anxious about 
God." The occasional soul can meet all queries 
about God with the rejoinder Whittier makes : 

" I have no answer for myself or thee, 
Save that I learned beside my mother's knee : 
All is of God that is, and is to be, 
And God is good. Let this suffice us still 
Resting in childlike trust upon his will, 
Who moves to his great ends unthwarted by the ill." 

(121) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

And yet the strife of tongues continues about the 
idea of God. Every definition of rehgion assumes 
a certain acquaintance with it. Before ever John 
Fiske wrote about the everlasting reaHty of reh- 
gion he gave the world his Idea of God. Says 
Campbeh, "No God ; no religion." It is there- 
fore worth our while to read the latest words 
about the idea of God. 

Campbell points out (pp. 29-76) that the system 
of ideas which prove the world and make it up 
is "evidence of the one primordial realit}^ God." 

Sabatier (chap. 11) strikes the keynote of our 
belief in God in quoting Pascal, "Thou wouldst 
not seek me hadst thou not already found me." No 
one can read this chapter without understanding 
that knowledge of God is inseparably associated 
with redemption by him. Only they understand 
who are saved or being saved. (4) 

We hear much in these days about the divine 
immanency. Pike's book, not perhaps so well 
known as it ought to be, is written to explain the 
immanency of God. He shows in chapter one how 
the meaning of the term God changes from age 
to age ; how m.en have outgrown the thought of 
God and the universe as two distinct existences ; 
how God manifests himself to men, and the 
way in which belief in God arises. Chapter six 
ought also to be read because the author there 
distinguishes between the transcendence and im- 
manence of God. (5) 



(122) 



Current Religious Thought 



In the same connection it would be well to con- 
sider the argument of Griffith-Jones (pp. 34-39), 
who, like Pike, writes in terms of evolution. 

One of McConn ell's Essays Practical and 
Speculative (pp. 157-168) also sets forth the idea 
of God in evolutionary phraseology with clearness 
unique and startling. (6) 

Clarke (part i) gives a comprehensive treat- 
ment of the idea of God in the light of Chris- 
tianity as well as of evolution. It should be 
read in closing the subject. 

[c) MAN 

Of man's place in the new theology there is 
testimony enough. Drummond's Ascent of Man 
and Fiske's Destiny of Man are still worth read- 
ing. Griffith-Jones' Ascent through Christ is 
stimulating from cover to cover. Campbell's 
chapter (pp. 79-104) shows us how the ''two 
transcendent powers of self-consciousness and 
self-direction" gave man a supreme place in the 
order of existence. Nothing could be more sug- 
gestive than Pike's picture of man's position in 
the universe ; but the references are so numer- 
ous that one should consult the index in study- 
ing them. Clarke (pp. 182-226) gathers up all 
the evidences and sets them out forcibly. 

(d) IMMORTALITY 

Though the chief spokesmen of modern science 
are inclined to affirm that science has nothing to 



(123) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



say about man's survival after death, the inter- 
est in the subject was never keener than it is 
today. 

Griffith-Jones (pp. 351-359) gathers up the evi- 
dences pj'o and coil and pictures the resurgence 
of human longing for immortality. (7) 

Professor James' Ingersoll lectures, pub- 
lished in a little book called Human Immortality, 
exposed the fallacy underlying the argument 
drawn from the supposed causal connection be- 
tween brain and mind. His words are final. 
Everyone should read this and his earlier volume, 
The Will to Believe and Other Essays. Profes- 
sor James has been and still is a make-weight for 
faith with whom the incredulous must reckon. So 
true is this that a recent contributor to The Sim- 
day School Times more than half seriously pro- 
posed *' Professor James as a substitute for church 
going." 

Is spiritism contributing anything to our knowl- 
edge of immortality ? Nobody is quite sure. 
The returns are not all in. The latest word ap- 
pears in Professor Shaler's book on The Indi- 
vidual, and most of us will doubtless rest our case 
just there for the present. (8) 

Everybody has of late been reading McCon- 
nell's The Evolution 0/ Immortality. Like Clarke's 
book it is literature as well as theology. Dr. 
McConnell would have us believe that man is not 
immortal, only "immortable," capable of winning 

(124) 



Current Religious Thought 



immortality if only he is worthy. While not all 
are convinced, many are on the way to convic- 
tion, like the clever college professor who writes 
in a personal letter, ''I want to thank you for 
The Evolution of Immortality. I have been read- 
ing and rereading it and thinking about it and 
reading reviews of it and have not yet finished. 
It grows on me." If not epoch-making — and it 
may be — the book is at least epoch marking. 

II. 

Humanity was the central message of the nine- 
teenth century, and Gordon's statement of the mes- 
sage leaves nothing to be desired. Ross' Social 
Control treats the subject vividly from the socio- 
logical standpoint, separating ''the individual con- 
tribution to social order from that of society," 
but his book leaves God out of consideration 
and, in spite of its sociological value, cannot 
shed light on the Christian pathway. Everyone 
will want to see between covers Lyman Abbott's 
articles on ''The Rights of Man" now appearing 
in The Outlook, for he supplements Gordon and 
makes a distinct contribution to the solution of 
twentieth century problems. Every word that 
Lyman Abbott writes bears on this subject and 
should be read. He is past-master in the art of 
interpreting Christianity in the language of our 
time. 



(125) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



III. 

The new appreciation of Christianity is coming. 
The cry of "Back to Christ!" is meeting a re- 
sponse. The latest book in evidence is Har- 
nack's What is Chris tiaiiity ? Everybody ought 
to read this book. It is in Germany the book of 
the year. Here also it has stirred up controversy. 
Though evangelical in spirit it is rational in 
method. It was recently the chief theme of dis- 
cussion at the Berlin Pastoral Conference and the 
object of the following resolutions : 

**The Pastoral Conference recognizes in Prof, Har- 
nack's lectures on What is Christianity f the purpose 
of restoring to our so largely de-Christianized genera- 
tion the blessings of Christianity, but at the same time 
expresses its conviction that the content of these lec- 
tures, both by its relapse to the standpoint of a bygone 
rationalism and by its rejection of that which Scripture 
and history show to be the real essence of Christianity, 
fails to do justice to a true comprehension of history as 
well as to the true Gospel and to the needs of humanity. 
This conference with the reformers and the faithful of 
all ages, who have spoken by the power of the Holy 
Spirit, testifies that Christ, the Son of God, must remain 
in indivisible association with the Gospel, as the central 
point of Christianity, and subscribes to the confession, 
T believe in Jesus Christ, God's only begotten Son, our 
Lord.' " 

One need not agree with the author to profit by 
his turning the discussion back to the very sources 
of Christianity. (9) 

(126) 



Current Religious Thought 

As an offset to Harnack one cannot too heartily 
commend Dr. Minton's Christianity Stcpernatiiral, 
chapters two and three. Moderator of the General 
Assembly of the Presbyterian Church and some- 
time opponent of the revision of the Confession of 
Faith, he is, regardless of denominational lines, 
one of the very foremost defenders of ortho- 
doxy. His book is a model of clearness and con- 
ciseness. (10) 

There is, of course, a via media between Har- 
nack and Minton, and they who walk in it would 
do well to read Clarke (pp. 260-368), Campbell 
(pp. 167-224), Sabatier (pp. 119-225). 

For a special study of Christology in the light 
of evolution the reader is referred to Griffith-Jones 
and Pike. (See index.) 

This naturally leads to a consideration of the 
Holy Spirit and his work, and nothing could be 
more impressive than Clarke's great chapter on 
this subject. 

IV. 

The discipline of doubt is adequately treated in 
Gordon (chap. iv). But those who have not yet 
read van Dyke's Gospel for an Age of Doubt, 
James' The Will to Believe and other Essays, and 
Dr. Bruce' s Apologetics (book i, chap, vii), would 
find this a good time to read them. Then, be- 
sides. The Outlook is ever and anon dealing with 
the subject as only The Outlook can. 



(127) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

V. 

The return of faith is unmistakable. The signs 
are everywhere, as Gordon (chap, v) says, and 
Sabatier too (preface xiv). Faith has returned, 
for "man is a reHaious animal," as Burke lonpf 
since observed, and must have faith. (11) 

VI. 

Gordon's most original chapter is perhaps 
chapter six, in which he shows the new help history, 
in the modern sense, has given faith. No other 
word is needed. 

VII. 

"Things expected" is a large topic. Its treat- 
ment must be more or less subjective. Gordon 
groups the things expected in his seventh chapter. 
Most thinkers of his school will agree with him, 
but there are others who look for developments 
in religious life outside the range of Gordon. 
The Calvinist, the Evangelical, the Sacramenta- 
rian — each has his hope and needs no special 
counsel as to the literature in which to find it 
treated and confirmed. Minton, Clarke, McCon- 
nell are always helpful whatever be one's attitude. 

VIII. 

The right to criticize the Bible is still disputed. 
Dr. Minton (p. 128) gives a grudging consent, 
and minimizes the results of modern criticism. 
Concerning criticism of the New Testament the 

(128) 



Current Religious Thought 



returns are practically all in. The Twentieth 
Century New Testament is really a twentieth 
century translation, and may prove helpful to 
those who know no Greek. Dr. Gould's book 
should be read and then reread. A little while 
ago Sayce and Hommel thought they found 
a contradiction between modern criticism and 
archeology (Smith, pp. 56-70). Green and others 
have pointed out apparent contradictions among 
the results of criticism. (12) 

The three important books to read in finding 
out the spirit and the method of Old Testament 
criticism are, of course, Smith's, Batten's, and 
Lyman Abbott's. Together they tell the whole 
story, and no one has perhaps a right to an opin- 
ion who is not familiar with these books or, at 
any rate, with their subject matter. (13) 

Especially important is the second chapter in 
Batten's book in which the general arguments 
against the validity of critical results are consid- 
ered and answered. The limits of criticism are 
clearly set by Dr. Batten on page 340. (14) 

To these may as well be added Rogers* new 
book on Babylonia and Assyria and his articles 
now appearing in The Sunday School Times on 
'* Recent Exploration in Bible Lands." 

IX. 

The course and character of modern criticism 
need possibly no other description than appears in 



91 (129) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



Smith, lecture two. And yet Dr. Worcester in his 
important book, which Dr. Talcott WiHiams says 
in Book News, August, 1901, ''puts Genesis in its 
related place, no more accurate in narrative than 
any other transcription of myths, but of priceless 
value for its moral teaching and religious inspira- 
tion," gives such an admirable illustration of the 
real character of modern criticism that every one 
will find his book of interest. (15) 

X. 

What is left of the Old Testament after criti- 
cism is told by Smith (lecture iii). Batten (chaps. 
iii-xi) and Driver in the new edition of his 
Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testa- 
ment. 

XL 

Behef in a divine revelation is surely left us, 
thinks Smith (lecture iv), and in this view Batten, 
Driver, and Sanday concur. (16, 17) 

XII. 

Smith's treatment (lecture v) of the spirit of 
Christ in the Old Testament needs no special 
comment. 

XIII. 

All there is to say, perhaps, about the hope of 
immortality in the Old Testament is said by 
Smith (lecture vi). 

(130) 



Current Religious Thought 

XIV. 

To Smith's words about the prophets (lecture 
vii) should be added Batten's (chap, viii) and 
Minton's (chap. viii). (18) 

XV. 

The Wisdom literature is treated by Smith 
(lecture viii) and Driver (chaps, viii, ix, x). 

XVI. 

On the social question literature is abundant. 
A new appreciation of the social teachings of 
Jesus began with the appearance in 1865 of Ecce 
Homo, Canon Fremantle's The World as the 
Sttbject of Redemption appeared in 1885, with an 
introduction by Professor R. T. Ely. Four years 
later Professor Ely published his Social As- 
pects of Christianity which had a wide influence. 
Current literature begins probably with the ap- 
pearance in 1897 of Shailer Mathews' The Social 
Teaching of Jesus, sane and wholesome, and 
reaches its highest point in Jesus Christ and the 
Social Question, by Professor Peabody (1901). 
The two books cover the same field, but Pro- 
fessor Peabody, perhaps, carries the discussion 
farther and deeper than Professor Mathews. The 
reader should not omit a single page of either 
book, nor should he fail to read Fremantle's new 
book. 



(131) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

XVII. 

What the social principles of Jesus really were, 
Professor Peabody discusses in chapter two and 
Professor Mathews in his introduction. (19) 

XVIII. 

Of Christ's teachings concerning the family, 
Peabody writes at length in chapter three, of 
which pages 129-133, 151-166, 171-182, will be 
found of special value. In his fourth chapter 
Mathews covers the same ground. Of peculiar , 
interest at this time are their words, in practical 
agreement, about the attitude of Jesus toward 
divorce. See Peabody (p. 152) and Mathews 
(p. 84); also the report of the Committee on 
Marriage and Divorce of the House of Deputies 
of the General Convention of the Protestant Epis- 
copal Church held in the autumn of 1901 at San 
Francisco. (20) 

XIX. 

In these days of much talk about the duties of 
the rich it is important to know exactly what Jesus 
taught. The question is both large and intricate, 
but Peabody (chap, iv) makes out a clear case, 
and should be supplemented by Mathews (chap, 
vi) and Hyde (pp. 85-90). (21) 

XX. 

Concerning the poor, too, Jesus speaks un- 
mistakably, and his message will be clear to 

(132) 



Current Religious Thought 



those who read Peabody (chap, v) and Mathews 
(chaps. II, III, VII, viii). This may well be sup- 
plemented by Harnack (pp. 88 -loi) and by De- 
vine's The Practice of Charity, showing how sci- 
entific charity, in which Professor Peabody says 
the spirit of Jesus as to the poor and unfortunate 
is most clearly revealed, is actually administered. 
(22) 

XXI. 

As to the industrial order, no words could be 
more inspiring and convincing than Peabody' s 
(chap. VI), to which may be added Mathews, 
(chap. viii). 

XXII. 

Peabody' s correlation of the social questions in 
the spirit and Gospel of Jesus Christ speaks for 
itself. But they who would know exactly what 
the Christian world is doing to correlate the social 
forces will want to read Strong's Religions Move- 
ments for Social Betterment, 



(133) 



REFERENCE LIST 



BOOKS MENTIONED IN THE 
FOREGOING DISCUSSION OF 
THE LITERATURE OF CUR- 
RENT RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 

Abbott, Lyman — The Life and Literature of iJie 

Anciejit Hebrews. 
Batten, L. W. — TJie Old Testament fro7n the Modern 

Point of View. 
Campbell, R. ].—A Faith for To-day. 
Clarke, William Newton — An Outline of Christian 

Theology. 
Devine, E. T. — The Practice of Charity. 
Fiske, John — Thvugh Nature to God. 
Fremantle, William Henry — Christian Ordifiances and 

Social Progress. 
Gould, Ezra P. — The Biblical Theology of the New 

Testa7ne7it. 
Griffith- Jones, E. — The Ascefit through Christ, 
Harnack, Adolf — What is Christianity ? 
Hyde, William DeWltt — God's Educatio?i of Alan. 
James, William — The Will to Believe a7id Other Essays. 
King, Henry Churchill — Reconstruction in Theology. 
Mathews, Shall er — The Social Teaching of Jesics. 
McConnell, S. D. — Essays Practical and Speculative. 
McConncll, S. D. — The Evolution of Imtnortality. 
Minton, Henry Collin — CJiristianity Supernatural. 
Pike, Granville Ross — The Divine Drama. 
Sabatier, Auguste — Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, 
Strong, Josiah — Religious Movements for Social B etter- 

7nent. 
Worcester, El wood — TJie Book of Ge7iesis in the Light 

of Moderji Knowledge. 

(134) 



Illustrative Selections 



1. R.J. Campbell 

The highest type of humanity that the world has 
ever seen is that in which the spiritual, the moral, the 
rational, and the emotional sides of human nature are 
harmoniously combined ; when such is the case it is 
abundantly evident that man is constituted for religion. 
His spiritual possibilities only reach their highest when 
they are developed in company with his reason and his 
conscience, and reason and conscience in their turn only 
find their sanction in religion. Jesus of Nazareth is now 
the world's ideal of manhood ; most persons, in our own 
country at any rate, are prepared to admit this. Jesus 
has been called ** the supreme religious genius ; " he is 
also the most perfect moral character and the most 
tender, loving nature that the world has known. In these 
things he has set a standard for all time, and most 
remarkable of all perhaps, his words are as fresh today 
as they were when uttered in Galilee nineteen hundred 
years ago. He was guilty of no anachronisms or intel- 
lectual absurdities ; his teaching was reasonable, self- 
evident, and noble. No challenge uttered by the lips of 
man has ever been more completely triumphant than the 
assertion, " Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my 
words shall not pass away." I cannot help but refer to 
Jesus of Nazareth in this connection, for he is the 
supreme illustration of the point before us, that man is 
constituted for religion, and reaches his highest through 
the harmonious exercise of all the faculties of his com- 
plex and wonderful nature. The ideal of humanity is 
that which combines godliness, goodness, wisdom, and 
kindness. Relig-ion coordinates them all. 



'tj' 



(135) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

2. William Newtoii Clarke 

Religion, as we have seen, is natural to man, and 
practically universal. It does not wait for proof of the 
existence of God ; it springs up from an intuitive sense 
of unseen realities. Man looks upward and prays ; he 
thus bears testimony to his sense of dependence and 
obligation ; he thus recognizes a power and an authority 
above him ; and he thus assumes that there is some one 
to whom his prayer may properly be addressed. Religion 
may be crude and superstitious, and the object of wor- 
ship unknown and misjudged ; but the universal impulse 
and practice declare that religion belongs to the nature 
of man, and that there is a Being above man for him to 
worship. The religious constitution of man asserts that 
there is some Being whom man may worthily address in 
prayer. 

We instinctively trust our intellectual powers, and 
experience proves that v/e are safe in doing so, for we 
and the world are made upon one method. Are v/e 
equally safe in trusting the testimony of this religious 
intuition } Certainly we are, if we live in an honest 
world. Religious worship, obedience, and aspiration are 
as normal to man as sensation or reasoning. Any one of 
these powers may be misinformed or misdirected, yet 
they are genuine powers of man. Sense and reason are 
normally trustworthy, and so, we instinctively affirm, is 
the impulse to aspire, obey, and worship in the presence 
of a higher Power. If the religious faculty is a normal 
part of honest nature, then our sense of dependence is 
to be trusted when it bears witness to a higher Power, 
bows before a higher Authority, and aspires to a com- 
munion with a living God. In a world of reality every 
power has its counterpart, — the eye has light, the reason 
has truth, and the religious nature has God. If the 
religious nature in man has no real being corresponding 

(136) 



Current Religious Thought 

to it, no one who is worthy of the adoration and trustful 
obedience that man is moved to give to One above him, 
then we can only say that man was born with his highest 
nature looking out into empty space. He was endowed 
with noble powers that can only mislead and disappoint 
him ; and thus he comes into being possessed of a nature 
that is essentially false. Moreover, it is the highest in 
him that is false. But if human nature is false in its 
highest region, — false by being made so in its very con- 
stitution, — then we cannot be sure that it is true in any 
department of its activity. If we say that man's highest 
nature naturally deceives him, we resign all right to rely 
upon our nature or the validity of our powers, and confi- 
dence in our mental processes is at an end. We are 
compelled to trust our own powers just as truly in the 
religious realm as in the physical or the intellectual. If 
we are not safe in this, we are sure of nothing ; and the 
powers that we are compelled to trust affirm that there 
is One above us who is worthy of our love and adoration. 
This assertion of our religious powers is confirmed 
by experience. History has shown that religion is a 
normal exercise of humanity. The thought of a God 
worthy to be worshipped is adapted to man. Just as the 
mind of man has proved itself adapted to a world that is 
constructed according to the methods of mathematics, 
so the spirit of man has proved itself adapted to a world 
in which there is a good God, with worthy power and 
authority over human beings. Man comes to his best 
life only in proportion as such a God is recognized. The 
history of man shows that his nature and life are incom- 
plete without a God from whom he can learn his duty, 
whom he can love, and in whom his sense of dependence 
can find a worthy peace. Moreover, every step of safety 
and success in trusting our rational powers argues the 
trustworthiness of our religious faculty. Every gain of 

(137) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

science is fresh evidence that we live in an honest world, 
in which our powers will not call in vain for their 
counterparts. 

3. Angus te Sabatier 

From this feeling of distress, from this initial con- 
tradiction of the inner life of man, religion springs. It 
is the rent in the rock through which the living and life- 
giving waters flow. Not that religion brings a theoret- 
ical solution to the problem. The issue it opens and 
proposes to us is pre-eminently practical. It does not 
save us by adding to our knowledge, but by a return to 
the very principle on which our being depends, and by 
a moral act of confidence in the origin and aim of life. 
At the same time this saving act is not an arbitrary 
one ; it springs from a necessity. Faith in life both is 
and acts like the instinct of conservation in the physical 
world. It is a higher form of that instinct. Blind and 
fatal in organisms, in the moral life it is accompanied 
by consciousness and by reflective will, and, thus trans- 
formed, it appears under the guise of religion. 

Nor is this life-impulse {elan de la vie) produced in 
the void, or objectless. It rests upon a feeling inherent 
in every conscious individual, the feeling of dependence 
which every man experiences with respect to universal 
being. Which of us can escape this feeling of absolute 
dependence .? Not only is our destiny, in principle, 
decided outside ourselves and apart from ourselves ac- 
cording to the general laws of cosmical evolution, in the 
course of which we appear at a given time and place 
with a heritage of forces which we have not chosen or 
produced, but, not being able to discover in ourselves 
or in any series of individuals the sufflcient reason of 
our existence, we are obliged to seek outside ourselves, 
in universal being, the first cause and ultimate aim of 

(138) 



Current Religious Thought 



our existence and our life. To be religious is, at first, 
to recognize, to accept with confidence, with simplicity 
and humility, this subjection of our individual con- 
sciousness ; it is to bring this back and bind it to its 
eternal principle ; it is to will to be in the order and the 
harmony of life. This feeling of our subordination thus 
furnishes the experimental and indestructible basis of 
the idea of God. This idea may possibly remain more 
or less indetermined, and may indeed never be perfected 
in our mind ; but its object does not on that account 
elude our consciousness. Before all reflection, and be- 
fore all rational determination, it is given to us and, as 
it were, imposed on us in the very fact of our absolute 
dependence ; without fear we may establish this equa- 
tion : the feeling of our dependence is that of the mys- 
terious presence of God in us. Such is the deep source 
from which the idea of the divine springs up within us 
irresistibly. But it springs at once as religion and as 
an effect of religion. 

At the same time, it is well to note at what a cost 
the mind of man accepts this subordination in relation 
to the principle of universal life. We have seen this 
mind in conflict with external things. The mind revolts 
against them because they are of a different nature to 
itself, and because it is the proud prerogative of mind to 
comprehend, to dominate, to rule things and not to be 
subordinate to them. Pascal's phrase is to the point : 
*' Man is but a reed, the feeblest thing in nature ; but he 
is a thinking reed. Were the universe to crush him, 
man would still be nobler than the universe that killed 
him, for he would be conscious of the calamity, and the 
universe would know nothing of the advantage it pos- 
sessed." That is why the material universe is not the 
principle of sovereignty to which it is possible for man 
to submit. The superior dignity of spirit to the totality 



(139) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



of things can only be preserved in our precarious indi- 
viduality by an act of confidence and communion with 
the universal Spirit. It is only on a spiritual power 
that my consciousness does actually make both me and 
the universe to depend, and in making us both to de- 
pend on the same spiritual power, it reconciles us to 
each other, because, in that universal bqing conceived 
as spirit, both I and the universe have a common prin- 
ciple and a common aim. Descartes was right : the 
iirst step of the human mind desirous of confirming to 
itself the sense of its own worth and dignity is an essen- 
tially religious act. The circle of my mental life, which 
opens with the conflict of these two terms — conscious- 
ness of the ego, experience of the world — is completed 
by a third in which the other terms are harmonised : 

the sense of their common dependence upon God 

Religion then is inward prayer and deliverance. It 
is inherent in man and could only be torn from his 
lieart by separating man from himself, if I may so say, 
and destroying that which constitutes humanity in him. 
I am religious, I repeat, because I am a man, and neither 
have the wish nor the power to separate myself from 
my kind. 



4. August e Sabatier 

In the region of authentic Christianity you cannot 
separate the revealing act of God from his redeeming 
and sanctifying action. God does not enlighten, on 
the contrary he blinds those whom he does not save 
or sanctify. Let us boldly conclude, therefore, against 
all traditional orthodoxies, that the object of the revela- 
tion of God could only be God himself, that is to say 
the sense of his presence in us, awakening our soul to 
the life of righteousness and love. When the word of 
God does not give us life, it gives us nothing. It is 

(140) 



Current Religious Thought 

true that that presence and that action of the divine 
Spirit in our hearts become in them a light whose rays 
illumine all the faculties of the soul. But do not hope 
to enjoy that light apart from the central sun from 
which it flows. 

5. Granville Ross Pike 
Before man was, the cosmos was ; before the cos- 
mos, that from which the cosmos springs. The order 
of existence is God, world, man ; the order of human 
discovery is self, world, God. This one inestimable 
service is rendered the cause of true religion by that 
scientific hypothesis which we have been following. It 
has given us just that vital and reasoned concept of 
God of which we stood in need, and in its light God 
and his revelation of himself cease to be antiques. God 
spake to our fathers yesterday ; he speaks to us today. 
He is not a fact of history, which may be stated and 
catalogued once for all, but a living person with whom 
every man stands in personal relation. Wherefore, a 
realization of God is the first necessity of each genera- 
tion in order to determine what man himself is, and is 
to do and to be. Professor Tyndall on the summit of 
the Matterhorn, asking whether his thought as it ran 
back to the star-dust thus returned to its primeval 
home, is a universal type of mankind in his recognition 
of personal responsibility in these mysterious problems 
of being ; for all science and philosophy and theology 
are but the endeavor of the human mind, finding itself 
in a world already existing, to follow back the process 
of becoming, until it can correlate the outer world of 
fact with the inner world of experience. 

6. 6". D. McConnell 
The popular thought about God is in process of 

change. Until lately men thought of him as having 

(141) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

his seat at some remote and inaccessible region in space 
and time. From there he emerged at a definite point 
in the past and caused a universe to be where before emp- 
tiness had been. During a " Creative Week " he labored 
like a cunning artificer, finished his work, pronounced it 
very good, rested and withdrew. Orthodoxy was alarmed 
and indignant when first called upon to expand these 
creative days, first into centuries, and then into aeons. 
It piques itself upon having been able to effect this ex- 
tension without disaster to itself. But the average 
educated man has some time since abandoned this way 
of thinking altogether. He has come to believe that 
time with God is all of one piece, that he works 
continually, and that he works not from without 
but from within, that he is not remote or apart from the 
universe and never has been, that he is in and behind 
and through all things, processes and forces, not identi- 
fied with them, but apprehensible apart from them. So 
far as men are now theistic they think of God imma- 
nent. . . . 

It may as well be confessed that this way of con- 
ceiving God is unsatisfactory to many and irritating to not 
a few. It is not nearly so clearly cut, sharply defined and 
easily presentable in thought as the one which it super- 
sedes. That one is simple, portable, always available for 
the practical needs of teacher or exhorter. It is charged 
against this one that it is vague, elusive, and in places 
inconsistent. To this charge two retorts are possible. 
The first is, this is the God of St. John, St. Paul, and 
Jesus. The second is, it is better to conceive vaguely 
of a true God than precisely of a false one. But the 
fact remains that a man born and reared under the evo- 
lutionary way of thinking about God, man, and nature, — 
that way which has possession of the centres of learning, 
which is in the text-books of public schools, and which 

(142) 



Current Religious Thought 



colors popular speech, — can no more rest content with 
the current notion of God than he could present him 
under the figure of Buddha or the " oiled and curled 
Assyrian Bull." Science is slowly but firmly escorting 
that simulacrum of a divinity to the frontiers of the 
universe. God is not the mighty ruler sitting upon a 
remote throne outside nature, making incalculable incur- 
sions from thence within its realms, and retiring again 
to the high seat. We do not ask who shall ascend into 
heaven and bring him down, or who shall descend into 
the abyss to bring him up. For we know that he is 
most nigh. '' Closer is he than breathing, and nearer 
than hands or feet." Shall we thrust him farther away 
in order that \yq may distinguish his outlines more 
closely ? Shall we not rather go on serenely, unmindful 
of the scorn of those who so adore definiteness of doc- 
trine that they will worship no God that cannot be 
defined ? 

«&& 
7. B. Griffith- Jones 

When we read the imagery of the Bible in the light 
of the evolutionary science of human nature which has 
made such rapid strides of late years, we find nothing 
which is not capable of being translated into the moulds 
of modern thought. It all harmonizes with the idea 
that man in this state of existence is still a being "in 
the making." If he is the crown of Nature's vital pro- 
cesses so far as his physical constitution is concerned, 
he bears in his organization infallible marks that he is 
meant for higher things than can be attained within 
the narrow margin of existence permitted to him here. 
His highest powers are incipient. His spiritual affini- 
ties reach out towards the unseen ; there is nothing in 
this world that can adequately satisfy them. He has a 
hunger for righteousness, an ideal of goodness, a deep- 



(143) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



seated craving for holiness, in violent contrast with his 
present opportunities of attaining these objects of de- 
sire. Apart from a further opening for moral effort 
and victory, his spiritual career is a drama that ends in 
an anticlimax. Weary v/ith the struggle against evil, 
tormented with a perpetual sense of failure, eager to 
take up on a higher plane the spiritual endeavors which 
here bring so little sense of triumph, his eye turns with 
unspeakable longing to the land beyond the grave for 
the scope denied him in this life. And what he dimly 
sees there under the revealing light of the Gospel is 
enough to quicken his pulses to a "lively hope " that he 
has but to trust in God and do his best in order to 
attain a sure and everlasting reward. In this higher 
state the moral tangle of this life will be unraveled, the 
issues of character will be unfolded, the brightest 
dreams of the soul will be realized. There will be rest^ 
victory, fellowship, service, progress and attainment in 
all that is most desirable and noble ; the " open vision " 
will take the place of surmise and cloudy uncertainty ; 
and all the germinal powers of the soul will be expanded 
to their full capacity. 

8. Nathaniel Soiithgate Shaler 

Notwithstanding this urgent disinclination to med- 
dle with or be muddled by the problems of spiritism, 
the men of science have a natural interest in the in- 
quiries of the few true observers who are dredging in 
that dirty sea. Trusting to the evident scientific faith- 
fulness of these hardy explorers, it appears evident that 
they have brought up from that deep certain facts 
which, though still shadowed by doubt, indicate the 
persistence of the individual consciousness after death. 
It has, moreover, to be confessed that these few as yet 
imperfect observations are fortified by the fact that 



(144) 



Current Religious Thought 

through all the ages of his contact with nature man has 
firmly held to the notion that the world was peopled 
with disembodied individualities which could appeal to 
his own intelligence. Such a conviction is itself worth 
something, though it be little. Supported by any criti- 
cal evidence it becomes of much value. Thus we may 
fairly conjecture that we may be on the verge of some- 
thing like a demonstration that the individual conscious- 
ness does survive the death of the body by which it was 
nurtured. 

9. Ado// Harnack 
In these lectures, then, we shall deal first of all with 

the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and this theme will occupy 
the greater part of our attention. We shall then show 
what impression he himself and his Gospel made upon 
the first generation of his disciples. Finally, we shall 
follow the leading changes which the Christian idea has 
undergone in the course of history, and try to recognise 
its chief types. What is common to all the forms which 
it has taken, corrected by reference to the Gospel, and, 
conversely, the chief features of the Gospel, corrected 
by reference to history, will, we may be allowed to hope, 
bring us to the kernel of the matter. 

10. Henry Collin Minion 
Christianity is the religion of Jesus Christ : actually, 

as it is ; ideally, as it would be. It stands over against 
all other systems that claim the religious faith and 
homage of mankind, and against that self-exiling no- 
religion which kills the highest life of men. 

It is not dogma only, though it has its dogmatic 
side. It is not feeling only, though every soul it touches 
has deep and vivid emotions responding to that touch. 

loi (145) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



It is not a code of morals only, though it has its ethical 
principles and precepts, its " thou shalt " and " thou shalt 
not." It is not a form only, though the forms and in- 
stitutions it sanctions in the holy Church are for the 
honor of God and the good of men. It is not a life 
only, though it is life and gives life to all who will 
heartily receive it. It is not a sect only, though it can- 
not be denied that the saintliest and best of its cham- 
pions in every age have been loyally identified with some 
branch or division of the Church of God on earth. 

11. Auguste Sabatier 

To a generation that believed it could repose in 
positivism in philosophy, utilitarianism in morals, and 
naturalism in art and poetry, has succeeded a genera- 
tion that torments itself more than ever with the mys- 
tery of things, that is attracted by the ideal, that dreams 
of social fraternity, of self-renunciation, of devotion to 
the little, to the miserable, to the oppressed — devotion 
like the heroism of Christian love. Hence what has 
been called the renaissance of idealism, the return, i. e.y 
to general ideas, to faith in the invisible, to the taste 
for symbols, and to those longings, as confused as they 
are ardent, to discover a religion or to return to the 
religion their fathers have disdained. Our young peo- 
ple, it seems to m.e, are pushing bravely forward, march- 
ing between two high walls : on the one side modern 
science with its rigorous methods which it is no longer 
possible to ignore or to avoid ; on the other, the dogmas 
and the customs of the religious institutions in which 
they were reared, and to which they would, but cannot, 
sincerely return. The sages who have led them hitherto 
point to the impasse they have reached, and bid them 
take a part, — either for science against religion, or for 

(146) 



Current Religious Thought 

religion against science. They hesitate, with reason, in 
face of this alarming alternative. Must we then choose 
between pious ignorance and bare knowledge ? Must 
we either continue to live a moral life belied by 
science, or set up a theory of things which our con- 
sciences condemn ? Is there no issue to the dark and 
narrow valley which our anxious youth traverse ? I 
think there is. I think I have caught glimpses of a 
steep and narrow path that leads to wide and shining 
table-lands above. Indeed I have ascended in the foot- 
steps of some others, and I signal in my turn to younger, 
braver pioneers who, in course of time, will make a 
broader, safer road, along which all the caravan may 
pass. 

12. Henry Collin Minton 
Let the critics have their way ; let unbelief cut and 

cleave to its full content ; let men prove, if they can, 
that the dear old Bible is a tissue of falsehoods or of fol- 
lies : when they have done, we shall claim the humble 
right to call attention to the strangest of all strange 
facts, that this ** scroll of fancies " is the subject of more 
study, more investigation, more serious thought, than 
any other hundred books in any library of the world ; 
that this "bundle of superstitions " lies imbedded like a 
corner-stone of granite beneath the grandest achieve- 
ments of human civilization, and that this little manual 
of "exploded nonsense" somehow continues to hold its 
own, and, in Mr. Gladstone's words, " invites, attracts, 
and commands the adhesion of mankind." 

13. Lyman Abbott 
What will the New Criticism do with the Bible, 

is a fair question to ask, and the time has come to 
give it at least a partial answer. The believer in the 

(147) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



New Criticism replies that it has already brought 
back into the Bible some books which had almost 
dropped out of it, such as the Song of Songs, Ec- 
clesiastes and Job ; that it has relieved from some 
ethical difficulties some other books, such as Joshua and 
Leviticus ; that it has made credible as fiction some 
passages which had been incredible as history, such as 
the legend of the Fall and the satire of Jonah ; that it 
has made practically applicable to our own time other 
portions of the Bible, such as the civil laws contained in 
Exodus and Deuteronomy ; that it has given a new and 
deeper spiritual significance to still other portions, as to 
some of the Psalms and to the latter half of the Book of 
Isaiah. The end is not yet ; but enough has been accom- 
plished to satisfy the believer in the New Criticism that 
its effect will be to destroy that faith in the letter which 
killeth, and to promote that faith in the spirit which 
maketh alive ; to lead the Christian to see in the Bible 
a means for the development of faith in the God of the 
Bible, not an object which faith may accept in lieu of 
God's living presence ; to regard the Bible, not as a book 
of philosophy about religion, but as a book of religious 
experiences, the more inspiring to the religious life of 
man because frankly recognized as a book simply, 
naively, divinely human. 

14. L. JV. Batten 

The Old Testament must be studied scientifically. 
The literary critic, the historical critic, the historian of 
religion, the archaeologist, the grammarian and the 
lexicographer, must contribute all the light they have 
to the solution of its many hard problems. We shall 
but delude ourselves if we ever say their work is fin- 
ished, they can go no further ; we are willing to accept 
what they have at present achieved if they will rest 



(148) 



Current Religious Thought 

content. It can never be said to these investigators, so 
far you shall go and no farther, so long as they keep to 
their proper sphere, which is largely the human element 
in the Scriptures. But if they ever attempt to go 
farther, and say that God was not behind Israel in their 
history, in their institutions, in their religion and in 
their literature, then we may point out the great gulf 
which the literary critics may not cross. 



15. Elwood Worcester 

On the other hand, as soon as we recognize 
these stories for what they are, popular Semitic tra- 
ditions of an illimitable past, given an eternally true 
and beautiful setting by men truly inspired by God, we 
can appreciate them ; we can learn from them the 
truths of God they are so well able to teach us, without 
stultifying all our thought by trying to believe the im- 
possible. The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowl- 
edge of good and evil grow only on the soil of faith. 
Giants who are the offspring of the sons of God and the 
daughters of men, antediluvians living nine hundred 
years apiece, are no part of that humanity whose days 
are three score years and ten. We admit then at once 
that these are myths and sagas ; that is to say, narra- 
tives told a thousand times, in the tent, beside the des- 
ert well, under the pleasant shade, or by the campfire 
at night, antedating the knowledge of writing by hun- 
dreds or perhaps thousands of years. They are the un- 
conscious product of youth, so perfect because so uncon- 
scious, marked by all childhood's happy disregard of 
reality, and true in precisely the same sense in which 
Shakespeare and Milton are true ; that is to say, true to 
nature, morally and spiritually true forever. No char- 
acters in the Old Testament possess more reality than 

(149) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. What are the men 
of authentic history, like Hezekiah, Jeroboam, and 
Ahab, beside them ? Humanity has stamped these men 
with its universal genius ; though without destroying one 
of their purely human traits. They are men still, not 
gods or demigods. They live now by virtue of their re- 
lations to God. All the rest is fallen away, hence their 
lives are so well adapted to teach us. 

16. Canon Driver 
Criticism in the hands of Christian scholars does 

not banish or destroy the inspiration of the Old Testa- 
ment ; it presupposes it ; it seeks only to determine the 
conditions under which it operates, and the literary 
forms through which it manifests itself, and it thus 
helps us to frame truer conceptions of the methods 
which it has pleased God to employ in revealing him- 
self to his ancient people of Israel, and in preparing 
the way for the fuller manifestation of himself in Christ 
Jesus. 

1 7 . William Sanday 
Just as one particular branch of one particular stock 

was chosen to be in a general sense the recipient of a 
clearer revelation than was vouchsafed to others, so 
within that branch certain individuals were chosen to 
have their hearts and minds moved in a manner more 
penetrating and more effective than their fellows, with 
the result that their written words convey to us truths 
about the nature of God and his dealings with man 
which other writings do not convey with equal fulness, 
power and purity. We say that this special moving is 
due to the action upon those hearts and minds of the 
Holy Spirit. And we call that action inspiration. 

(150) 



Current Religious Thought 

18. L. W. Batten 
The largest contribution to the development of a 

higher spiritual religion among the Jews was made by 
the prophets. The number of these was very large. 
From the time of Samuel, who established prophetic 
schools or guilds, until the fall of Jerusalem, the pro- 
phets were a large and influential class, contributing 
much to the development of the State and of the Church. 
But those who did most for the nation were the solitary 
voices crying in the wilderness. The great mass of 
prophets were not moved by the disinterested purpose 
which constrained Amos to continue his God-given mes- 
sage, even when enjoined to silence by priest and king, 
and Jeremiah to persist in his pleas for righteousness in 
the face of hard punishment and at the risk of his life ; 
yes, even when his own desires prompted him to silence. 
The spirit of these great prophets is a sufficient guaran- 
tee that they were not deluded in their belief that they 
were sent by God. 

19. Shailer Mathews 
The sources from which it is possible to draw the 

social teachings of Jesus are primarily, though not ex- 
clusively, his own words. At first glance, therefore, no 
problem could seem easier than the process of gaining 
such teachings. With most theologians of the past, 
with many of today, the ipsissima verba of the Master 
are an end of all discussion. But even if we disregard 
the possible changes incident to one or more processes 
of translation, it is a prime necessity that the interpreter 
remember that thought is superior to word, and that a 
sentence wrenched from its context may be quite as 
misleading as a similarly detached word. The thought 
of Jesus is sometimes so genuinely Oriental as to elude 
any process of interpretation that is purely verbal. His 

(151) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

style is so concrete, and his similes so perfect, that there 
is a constant temptation to forget that a parable, after 
all, can enforce only an analogy, and that the real teach- 
ing of its author lies not in its form but in the analogy. 
Further than this, Jesus seldom combined complement- 
ary or mutually modifying thoughts. He was not a sys- 
tematic lecturer, but a creator of impulses. He some- 
times puts forth a proposition so categorically as to 
make it appear that it exhausts his teachings upon the 
subject, and yet under some other circumstances its 
modification is expressed with equal absoluteness. The 
two superficially appear contradictory. In reality they 
are the two hemispheres of the truth. To claim either 
of them alone as his teaching is to do Jesus injustice. 
His real teaching can be gained only through their 
combination. For this reason, so far as a systematized 
and complete statement is concerned, outside of the 
magnificent summaries into which Jesus has compressed 
the essentials of religion and morals, no one can claim 
to have mastered Christian teaching until he has mas- 
tered its entirety. The failure to observ^e this simple 
caution lies at the bottom of much of the heresy and 
sectarianism of the centuries, and of no little crude 
religious instruction today. 

It is, therefore, above all necessary to study the 
words of Jesus not only as detached maxims, but as the 
scattered parts of a complete system of which they are 
the outcroppings and in the statement of which they 
may be harmonized. If this central principle be first 
discovered, many otherwise hard sayings will be seen 
to be simply striking forms in which it is applied to 
special needs. 



(152) 



Current Religious Thought 

20. Shailer Mathews 
Christ's teaching in regard to divorce becomes not 

only simple but inevitable. So long as marriage is not 
a mere matter of law or conventionality, but is one ex- 
pression of the fundamental social nature of man in 
both its physical and spiritual expression ; and so long 
as it is monogamous, to be characterized by the modesty 
that is possible alone in such a relation ; so long must 
it be unbreakable by statute. Divorce by Jesus is re- 
garded as impossible, except as a formal recognition of 
an already broken union. As marriage gives rise to an 
actual union of personalities it can be broken only by 
an actual severance of this union. When this is not 
the case, law can no more annul it than it can annul an 
arch. " What God hath joined together let not man put 
asunder." 

21. Shailer Mathews 
Jesus was neither a sycophant nor a demagogue. 

He neither forbids trusts nor advises them ; he is 
neither a champion nor an opponent of laissez faire ; he 
neither forbids trades unions, strikes and lock-outs, nor 
advises them ; he was neither socialist nor individualist. 
Jesus was a friend neither of the workingman nor the 
rich man as such. The question he would put to a man 
is not ** Are you rich .?" but ** Have you done the will of 
my Father .?" He calls the poor man to sacrifice as well 
as the rich man. He was the Son of Man, not the son 
of a class of men. But his denunciation is unsparing of 
those men who make wealth at the expense of souls ; 
who find in capital no incentive to further fraternity ; 
who endeavor so to use wealth as to make themselves 
independent of social obligations and to grow fat with 
that which should be shared with society ; — for those 
men who are gaining the world but are letting their 

(153) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



neighbors fall among thieves and Lazarus rot among 
their dogs. 

22. Ado// Harnack 
The Gospel is a social message, solemn and over- 
powering in its force ; it is the proclamation of solidar- 
ity and brotherliness, in favor of the poor. But the 
message is bound up with the recognition of the infinite 
value of the human soul, and is contained in what Jesus 
said about the kingdom of God. We may also assert 
that it is an essential part of what he there said. But 
laws or ordinances or injunctions bidding us forcibly 
alter the conditions of the age in which we may happen 
to be living are not to be found in the Gospel. 

23. Josiah Strong 
The newer activities, however, recognize the dignity 

and worth of the human body and the importance of its 
needs. Men are not looking so far afield to find God 
and heaven and duty. Religion is dealing less in fu- 
tures and laying more emphasis on the present. There 
is less spurning of earth to gain heaven and more effort 
to bring heaven to earth. Men are beginning to see 
that right relations with man are as real a part of the 
Christian religion as are right relations with God, and 
that the establishment of such relations should be a 
conscious object in religious effort. 

Expressed in a word, the nature of the change in 
religious activities is that they are now beginning to be 
directed to the uplifting of the whole man instead of a 
fraction of him, and to the salvation of society as well 
as to that of the individual. 

24. Dean Fremantle 
But the great question on which we are bound to 

be clear is one which is seldom touched upon, namely, 

(154) 



Current Religious Thought 

this : What is the object for which the Church exists ? 
The assumption that it exists primarily for public worship 
with some adjuncts of beneficence is usually accepted 
without question and I have given reasons why it should 
be rejected. The thesis which I would maintain in 
contrast to it is this : that the Church is a company of 
men banded together to establish Christ's righteousness 
in the world. This is the Church of the prophets, who 
bent all their powers to establish righteousness, and 
looked upon the ordinances of worship as only of use as 
bearing upon this. Their object was also that of our 
Lord, who never spoke of ordinances of worship — even 
the sacraments, as we shall see, being rather ordinances 
of life than of worship — but was himself the Righteous 
One, whose whole life was spent in the cause of right- 
eousness. This object is all-comprehensive, and there- 
fore the society which is grounded upon it, which has 
for its object to live out a complete life of Christian 
righteousness in its largest range, is alone worthy to be 
called "the body of Christ, the fullness of him who filleth 
all in all." No society but one which is thus complete 
can secure, in all their range, our true relations with 
God and with one another, or realize the promise that 
God, who is righteousness and love, shall dwell in his 
people. 



(155) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



Memoranda 



(156) 



Topics for Special Papers 
d for Open Discussion 



an 



1. What after all is religion ? 

2. The modern avenues to God. 

3. The origin of evil. 

4. The religious significance of social movements. 

5. The mystery of pain. 

6. The passing of agnosticism as illustrated in the 
career of G. J. Romanes. 

7. The attitude of Christ toward the Old Testament. 

8. The history of modern criticism. 

9. The Hexateuchal question. 

10. A critique of Renan's thesis that monotheism was 
native to the Semitic mind. 

11. The development of moral ideas among the He- 
brews. 

12. Messianic prophecy in the light of modern criti- 
cism. 

13. The arguments for miracles. 

14. Was Jesus a reformer or a revealer.^ 

15. Socialism and religion. 

16. Did Jesus array the poor against the rich } 

17. The place of wealth in Christian living. 

18. The problem of charity in the light of Peabody's 
book. 

19. Evolution and sin. 

20. How has evolution affected our view of the Old 
Testament } 

21. The place of death in evolution. 

22. McConnell's theory of *' immortability." 

23. The place of the atonement in evolution. 

24. Harnack's view of dogma. 

(157) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



Memoranda : 



(158) 



Supplementary Books 

Recommended for this Course 

BY LYMAN ABBOTT 



Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion. By 

Auguste Sabatier. 

A clear, comprehensive, and discriminating analysis 
of (i) religion, (2) Christianity, (3) dogma, both 
Catholic and Protestant. Auguste Sabatier has the 
modern view of the German, the practicality of the 
Englishman, and the clearness and brilliance of style 
characteristic of the Frenchman. 

What is Christianity ? By Adolf Harnack. 

Adolf Harnack is probably the foremost theologian 
of today in Germany. He is at once evangelical in 
spirit and rational in method. This volume consists 
of lectures delivered to a popular but student audi- 
ence. They were delivered extempore and were 
published as delivered. Most of his published writ- 
ings require for their understanding previous profes- 
sional training. These do not. They are given by 
one who believes in historical Christianity, but who 
also believes that its ethical and spiritual principles 
are more important than any philosophy which has 
grown out of them. 

The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity. By 

John Caird. 

This work covers somewhat the same ground as 
Sabatier's, but it is more abstract and less vital, treats 
Christianity more as a system of ideas and less as a 

(159) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 

life. It philosophically discusses natural and re- 
vealed religion, the origin and nature of evil, and the 
possibility of moral restoration through the Incarna- 
tion and Atonement. 

Ancient Ideals. By Henry Osborn Taylor. 

Described by its author as " a study of intellectual 
and spiritual growth from early times to the estab- 
lishment of Christianity." It is in effect, though 
not in form, a study in comparative religion, histori- 
cal and philosophical. 

The Apostolic Age. By Arthur Cushman 
?vIcGiffert. 

An admirable portrayal of Christian thought and 
life in the apostolic age ; especially notable for its 
admirable spiritual portrayal of the life and thought 
of the Apostle Paul. 

Apologetics. By Alexander Balmain Bruce, 

An admirable historico-interpretative account of the 
Jewish-Christian religion as contained in the Old 
and New Testaments. One of the best books from 
which to get the modern view of the Bible, 



The notes on the foregoing books were furnished by Dr, 
Abbott. 



(i6o) 



Twenty-Five Reading Courses 



No. I— PROBLEMS IN MODERN DEMOCRACY 

Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
course are ex-President Cleveland; Woodrow Wilson, Professor 
of Politics, Princeton University ; Henry J. Ford, author of Rise 
and Grozuth of American Politics; and Henry D, Lloyd, author 
of Nezvest Engla7id. The books for the course are selected 
by Mr. Cleveland. 

No. 2— MODERN MASTERS OF MUSIC 

Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
course are Reginald de Koven, Dr. W. S. B. Mathews, editor of 
Music ; James G. Huneker, editor of Musical Courier ; Henry 
E. Krehbiel, musical critic New York Tribune; and Gustave 
Kobbe, author of Wagner' s Life and Works. The most attrac- 
tive reading course ever offered to lovers of music. 

No. 3— RAMBLINGS AMONG ART CENTRES 

Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
course are F. Hopkinson Smith, Dr. John C. Van Dyke, Dr. 
John La Farge, President of the Society of American Artists ; 
Kenyon Cox and Dr. Russell Sturgis. The handbook is 
attractively illustrated. Mr. Smith and Dr. Van Dyke are 
responsible for selecting the books to be read. 

No. 4— AMERICAN VACATIONS IN EUROPE 

This course is the next best thing to going abroad oneself. 
Among the contributors to the handbook are Frank R. Stockton, 
Jeannette L. Gilder, editor of The Critic; Mrs. Schuyler Crown- 
inshield and George Ade. The handbook has a fine portrait 
frontispiece. 

No. 5— A STUDY OF SIX NEW ENGLAND CLASSICS 

The books for this course are selected by Dr. Edward 
Everett Hale. Among the contributors to the handbook are 
Dr. Hale, Julian Hawthorne, Mrs. James T. Fields and Dr. 
Edward Waldo Emerson. Dr. Emerson is a son of Ralph Waldo 
Emerson. This is one of the most attractive courses in the 
entire series. 

No. 6- SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLISH KINGS 

The plays are selected for this course by H. Beerbohm 
Tree, the well-known English actor, and the books to be read 
in connection with the plays are selected by Sir Henry 

(163) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



Irving. Among the other contributors to the handbook are Prof. 
Edward Dowden, acknowledged the greatest Shakespearean 
scholar of Great Britain, Dr. Hiram Corson, of Cornell Univer- 
sity; Dr. William J. Rolfe and Dr. Hamilton W. Mabie. The 
handbook is very attractively illustrated. 

No. 7— CHARLES DICKENS : HIS LIFE AND WORK 

Among the contributors to the delightful handbook accompany- 
ing this course are George \V. Cable, the well-known novelist; 
Irving Bacheller, author of Ebe7i Holden; Andrew Lang, the 
distinguished English writer ; Amelia E. Barr, the novelist ; and 
James L. Hughes, author of Dickeyis as an Educator. The 
books to be read are selected by Mr. Cable and Mr. 
Bacheller. The handbook is beautifully illustrated. 

No. 8— CHILD STUDY FOR MOTHERS AND TEACHERS 

Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
course are Margaret E. Sangster, Nora Archibald Smith, Anne 
Emilie Poulson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lucy Wheelock 
and Kate Gannett Wells. Mrs. Sangster selects the books to be 
read. 

No. 9— INDUSTRIAL QUESTIONS OF THE DAY 

The following distinguished writers on economic problems 
contribute to the handbook accompanying this course : Presi- 
dent Jacob Gould Schurman, of Cornell University ; Jeremiah 
Whipple Jenks, Professor of Political Science, Cornell University ; 
Richard Theodore Ely, Director of the School of Economics, 
Political Science and History, University of Wisconsin ; Sidney 
Webb, Lecturer London School of Economics and Political 
Science, Member London County Council ; and Carroll Davidson 
Wright, United States Commissioner of Labor. 

No. 10— FLORENCE IN ART AND LITERATURE 

Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
course are William Dean Howells, Dr. Russell Sturgis, Frank 
Preston Stearns, author of Midsiumner of Italian Art, Life of 
Tintoretto, etc. ; Dr. William Henry Goodyear, Curator Fine Arts 
Museum of Brooklyn Institute; and Lewis Frederick Pilcher, 
Professor of Art, Vassar College. The handbook has some 
attractive illustrations. 

No. II— STUDIES OF EUROPEAN GOVERNMENTS 

The books have been selected specially for this course by the 
Rt. Hon. James Bryce, of the English House of Commons^ and 
the Hon. Andrew D. White, United States Ambassador to Ger- 



(164) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



man}'. Among the other contributors to the handbook are Jesse 
Macy, Professor of Constitutional History and Pohtical Science, 
Iowa College; and John William Burgess, Professor of Political 
Science and Constitutional Law, and Dean of the Faculty of 
Political Science, Columbia University. 

No, 12— FAMOUS WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE 

Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
course are Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Margaret Deland 
and Charlotte Brewster Jordan. The handbook has several 
very interesting illustrations. 

No. 13— THE MODERN CITY AND ITS PROBLEMS 

Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
course are Dr. Frederic W. Speirs ; Dr. Albert Shaw, editor 
of The Review of Revieivs ; Bird S. Coler, Comptroller of the 
City of New York, author of Municipal Government ; and Charles 
J. Bonaparte, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the 
National Municipal League. The books are selected by Dr. 
Speirs. 

No. 14— STUDIES IN APPLIED ELECTRICITY 

This is without exception the most attractive and the most 
helpful reading course ever offered to students of electricity. 
Thomas A. Edison selects the books specially for these studies. 
Among the other contributors to the handbook are Dr. Edwin 
J. Houston, Dr. Elihu Thomson, Carl Hering, Ex-President of 
the American Institute of Electrical Engineers ; and Arthur V. 
Abbott, Chief Engineer of the Chicago Telephone Company. 

No. 15— FIVE WEEKS' STUDY OF ASTRONOMY 

Among tlie contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
course are Charles A. Young, Professor of Astronomy, Prince- 
ton University ; Sir Robert S. Ball, Professor of Astronomy, 
Cambridge University, and Director of Cambridge Observa- 
tory, England ; Camille Flammarion, founder of the As- 
tronomical Society of France, and author of Marvels of the 
Heavens, Astronomy, etc.; George C. Comstock, Director of 
Washburn Observatory, University of Wisconsin ; and Harold 
Jacoby, Professor of Astronomy, Columbia University. The 
study programme includes contributions from the most famous 
astronomers of England and France. 

No. i5— RECENT ENGLISH DRAMATISTS 

Lovers of the best modern dramas will find much pleasure in 
these studies. Among the contributors to the handbook are 
Brander Matthews, Professor of Literature, Columbia University; 

(^65) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



Dr. William Winter, Dramatic Critic for the New York Tribune ; 
Dr. Harry Thurston Peck, Editor of The Bookman; Louise 
Chandler Moulton ; and Norman Hapgood, the well-known 
writer of dramatic criticism. The handbook has some interest- 
ing illustrations. 

No. 17— STUDIES IN CURRENT RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 

The books are chosen for the course by Dr. Lyman Abbott 
and Dr. Washington Gladden. Among the contributors to 
the handbook are Dr. Samuel D. McConnell, Rector of Holy 
Trinity Church, Brooklyn ; President William DeWitt Hyde, of 
Bowdoin College ; Dr. Amory H. Bradford, Editor of The 
Outlook ; Dr. Henry Collin Minton, of San Francisco Theological 
Seminary, late Moderator of the Presb3terian General Assembly ; 
Dr. H. W. Thomas, Pastor of the People's Church, Chicago; 
and Dr. Theodore T. Munger, Pastor of the United Congrega- 
tional Church, New Haven. For clergymen and laymen who 
wish to stimulate the growth of a theology which is in harmony 
with the best thought of the time we recommend this handbook 
and this reading course. 

No. 18— THE GREATER VICTORIAN POETS 

The books are selected for this course by Thomas Bailey 
Aldrich. Among the other contributors to the handbook are 
Thomas R. Lounsbury, Professor of English, Yale University; 
Dr. T. M. Parrott, of Princeton University ; and Marie Ada Moli- 
neux, author of The Phrase Book of Browning. 

No. 19— OUT-OF-DOOR AMERICANS 

Among the contributors to the handbook accompanying this 
course are John Burroughs, Ernest Seton-Thompson, President 
David Starr Jordan, of the Leland Stanford Junior University ; 
Ernest Ingersoll and Hamlin Garland. Lovers of nature will 
find delight in the outlines and recommendations of this course. 

No. 20— THE WORLD'S GREAT WOMAN NOVELISTS 

Mrs. Humphry Ward, the well-known English novelist, is the 
first contributor to the handbook accompanying this course. 
The other contributors are Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, Mary 
E. Wilkins, Agnes Repplier, Katherine Lee Bates, Professor of 
English, Wellesley College; and Oscar Fay Adams. The hand- 
book contains some interesting illustrations. 

No. 21— AMERICAN FOUNDATION HISTORY 

Hon. Henr^' Cabot Lodge selects the books for this course. 
Among the other contributors are Albert Bushnell Hart, Pro- 
fessor of American History, Harvard University ; John Bach 

(166) 



The Booklovers Reading Club 



McMaster, Professor of American History, University of Penn- 
sylvania ; Reuben Gold Thwaites, Secretary of the State Histori- 
cal Society of Wisconsin, author of The Colonies ; Paul Leicester 
Ford, author of Janice Meredith; and Andrew Cunningham 
McLaughlin, Professor of American History, University of 
INIichigan. 

No. 22— STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERARY LIFE 

Professor Barrett Wendell and Professor Lewis E. Gates, of 
Harvard, and Dr. Horace E. Scudder, late editor of The Atlantic 
Monthly, contribute to the handbook accompanying this course. 
For a brief stimulative and instructive course in American litera- 
ture nothing better could possibly be offered. 

No. 23— STUDIES IN RECENT FRENCH FICTION 

Alcee Fortier, Professor of Romance Languages, Tulane 
University of Louisiana, has chosen the books for this reading 
course. Among the contributors to the handbook are the three 
distinguished French vi^riters, Edouard Rod, Ferdinand Bru- 
netiere and Paul Bourget, and the notable American critic, 
Dr. Benjamin W. Wells, author of Modern French Literattii^e and 
A Century of French Literature. 

No. 24— THE ENGLISH BIBLE : HOW WE GOT IT 

The contributors to this course include President William R. 
Harper, of the University of Chicago ; John Franklin Genung, 
Professor of Rhetoric, Amherst College ; William Newton Clarke, 
Professor of Christian Theology, Colgate University; and Richard 
G. Moulton, Professor of English Literature, University of 
Chicago. The handbook is a very interesting and instructive 
volume in itself. 

No. 25— THE MECHANISM OF 

PRESENT DAY COMMERCE 

/;/ Preparation. The books are selected by the Hon. Lyman 
J. Gage, Secretary of the Treasury. 



{.^(^1) 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: March 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATIOh 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724) 779-21 1 1 



bin:erV 

'303 



